


The Great Escape

by elanor_pam



Series: The Golden Age [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Harm to Children, Hurt/Comfort, Rescue Missions, Sexual Violence, Slave Trade, Space Pirates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-03 16:28:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 67,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2857436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanor_pam/pseuds/elanor_pam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>...and yet, the details of the home planet's protective measures are hardly the business of snot-nosed, unfinished miniature people, at least in the eyes of those who concern themselves with such matters; which was why neither Karkat nor any of his many neighbors could grasp the implications of a round landing module impacting halfway into someone's dutifully watered lawnring, and then another, past a couple hives, somewhere in the distance, incredibly close to their walls — landing modules dropping one after the other from the janky, aged and clearly unofficial vessel in the sky, and not a drone in sight.</p><p> Trolls poured out of the module and spread towards the nearby hives, weapons in hand. They wore mismatched clothes and clunky prosthetics. They were very obviously adults.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An introduction to Alternia's enforcement of adult exile (and its apparent failure)

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Rainbowbarnacle for being my soundboard and editor and letting me yap at her about this fic from its conception to its conclusion, and to Vastderp for double-checking the nasty and enduring the paddle. ♥ And thanks to all the commenters on the kinkmeme thread!
> 
> This version has some small additions in comparison to the homesmut one. You might think of it as the director's cut.

For reasons unknown to the average troll — that is to say, for reasons the average troll would be culled for knowing — adults are forbidden from setting foot on the home planet. Instead, they are conscripted for the glory of the empire as soon as full physical maturation is reached, leaving from strictly appointed landing pads on ships under strict imperial authorization. 

Pining for home is generally considered to be for “lamers”, “weaklings” and “whiners”, and yet, despite the planet's most valiant efforts to be nearly unlivable and veritably hellish, some trolls insist on doing so. For those who'd break all the laws and jump all the hurdles involved in setting their courses back to Alternia, however, there was one last set of deterrents between them and terra-firma: the Offensive Orbital Satellites, which would bombard any unauthorized vessel before it reached the thermosphere, and the Drones, which would swarm anything that made it past the former.

This system's implementation had very little to do with the safety of the planet-bound young. If any vessel happened to avoid the orbital defenses and hit the ground, not only would their ship become drone chow, so would any hives in the area. And of course, their job done, such a vessel would have to power through the same gauntlet of drones and satellites on their way out, while its survival chances took another plunge. 

Suffice to say, touching the ground and making it back to space was a source of much respect and bragging rights among outlaws, and there was a thriving black market for souvenirs from such trips, from drone carcasses to a handful of leaves. And if you happened to grab a hapless brat or two... well, there was just such a _je ne sais quoi_ about possessing a young, weak, easily trainable little slave, that certain subsets of bluebloods and above would be willing to pay through the nose for a half-broken one. There were certainly no lawful provisions against owning a miniature fucktoy, and it wasn't really a crime to buy from slave-traders of dubious sources. 

Which was why every new generation of adults would generate a new wave of fresh meat throwing itself at the orbital blockade in hare-brained kidnapping runs. Very, very few made it back, and of those who did, an even smaller number managed to swipe anything worth selling. But every now and then they'd find a couple of extremely profitable cargo to barely make up for all the damage incurred, and this unexpected windfall would start the cycle anew, curtailing the growing number of pirates in a very practical way.

This wasn't generally publicized, and certainly not on home-broadcast media. Which was why Karkat could not identify the approaching high-pitched thrum, and was confused by the distant groaning of tortured metal coming from above. But there were rumors, of course; despite how widely and loudly the Imperial Propaganderrorrists lauded the Alternian Stoicism and Trollkind's Instinct for Self-Reliance, no troll could resist the siren call of a gathered throng, whether real or virtual, nor curb the impulse to flap their gabholes, whether literally or metaphorically. Which was why, when Karkat peeked out of his window and found the source of the racket, it didn't take him long to figure out what he was looking at.

And yet, the details of the home planet's protective measures are hardly the business of snot-nosed, unfinished miniature people, at least in the eyes of those who concern themselves with such matters; which was why neither Karkat nor any of his many neighbors could grasp the implications of a round landing module impacting halfway into someone's dutifully watered lawnring, and then another, past a couple hives, somewhere in the distance, incredibly close to their walls — landing modules dropping one after the other from the janky, aged and clearly unofficial vessel in the sky, and not a drone in sight.

Trolls poured out of the module and spread towards the nearby hives, weapons in hand. They wore mismatched clothes and clunky prosthetics. They were very obviously adults.


	2. Glorious Last Stand

Karkat slowly walked back to his computer seat, his shoulders stiff and eyes wide and disbelieving of this semi-calm he was under, and wrote into the one chat window he had open:

TA: oh come on, iit'2 probably just 2omeone'2 2ciience project 2hootiing through the roof, you ju2t want two get out of beiing creamed on 2uper 2lash pro2.  
TA: iif you don't come back 2oon ii'm goiing two tally thii2 a2 another viictory for team 2ollux.  
CG: A BUNCH OF MODULES CAME DOWN AND A BUNCH OF TROLLS CAME OUT WITH WEAPONS AND I THINK THEY'RE PIRATES.  
TA: waiit what?  
CG: THERE'S A LOT OF SCREAMING AND NOISES AND I THINK THIS IS IT FOR ME.  
CG: I'M SORRY FOR BEING SUCH A SHITTY FRIEND, ALSO I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOUR CODES WERE FUCKING AWESOME BUT NEVER SAID SO OUT OF SOME DUMB PRIDE.  
TA: ok no, you're fuckiing 2hiittiing me.  
TA: oh god, don't 2ay thii2 kiind of 2hiit, iit'2 freakiing me out, ii don't beliieve you.  
CG: ALSO I NEVER TOLD ANYONE THIS, BUT I'M A MUTANT  
CG: I PROBABLY WASN'T GOING TO LIVE LONG ANYWAY  
TA: KK II DON'T FUCKIING CARE JU2T 2TOP TYPIING AND RUN  
TA: IIF THERE'2 REALLY ANYONE OUT THERE JU2T RUN  
CG: SO I GUESS I MEAN DON'T FEEL TOO AWFUL ABOUT IT BECAUSE I WAS NEVER GOING TO LAST AND IT'S PRETTY COOL THAT I ALMOST MADE IT TO SIX AND HAD FRIENDS AND SHIT  
TA: 2TOP TYPING YOU HUMONGOU2 A22 II GET IIT JUST GET THE FUCK AWAY YOU A22HOLE DON'T JU2T 2IIT THERE  
CG: JUST GO AND MAYBE TELL EVERYONE THAT THEY WERE ALL AWESOME AND DESPITE MY BLUSTER I REALLY DID LIKE EVERYONE A WHOLE LOT.  
CG: NOW I'M GONNA GO HIDE OR RUN OR SOMETHING THAT'LL MAKE THEM HAVE TO WORK TO GET ME, MY GLORIOUS LAST STAND OR SOMETHING

Out of an undefined impulse, Karkat captchalogued his computer and shoved the card behind a shelf before bursting into terrified tears. Someone's lusus screeched in the next house over, snapping him back to reality; he took one breath, then another, pulled out his sickle and proceeded to stumble his way down the stairs. Half-thoughts swirled around his head, of keeping his lusus quiet, hiding somewhere, crouching down in some dark place until the noise was over. 

It'll all come to nothing, he knew it in his gut. The hive was surrounded, the modules were everywhere. But by some miracle no one was kicking the door down when he made it to the food preparation block, and it remained unkicked while he shooshed Crabdad and coaxed him up the stairs step by laborious step. 

He'd just made it past the landing when the expected thud came, muffled and ineffective. Crabdad's claws skittered on the floor in surprise; he grasped his lusus by the torso and somehow managed to drag him (somehow convinced him to let himself be moved) towards a storage cubicle, opened the door as a louder crash resounded, pushed his custodian in when the crash turned into a crack and closed them both inside as the sound of footsteps grew louder.

He knew it wasn't going to work. He'd known from the beginning it was a long shot. But when the cubicle's door was yanked open after but a couple of shaky breaths he still knew terror like he'd never conceived of in his life.

Karkat barely caught a glimpse of the shadow glaring down at him — cerulean eyes, thick horns — when his lusus' claw shot forward and his weight pushed him down. From under his lusus' chest he heard his challenging screech rattle from its very root, and saw blue blood spatter over the floor and walls. 

The pirate's head dropped with a thud. For a wild moment Karkat thought it was a misshapen bag.

Crabdad lifted him and leaped out of the cubicle, waving his bloodstained claw at another invader. Karkat shook his sickle feebly at the enemy's general direction, but there really wasn't much he could do, Crabdad was moving too fast for him to even focus on his surroundings. 

Crabdad leaped down a flight of stairs and towards the broken door, but dove to the ground at the threshold, curling over him. There was a gurgle. He felt more than saw as Crabdad swung his claw, and there was a sound like an overripe fruit being smacked. Karkat couldn't tell what was going on; all he could see was the curtain of candy red dripping around him, slow and thick, and his lusus' body growing heavier and heavier at his back—

The universe slowed down and crawled to a halt as he laid smothered under his lusus' collapsed carapace. Sticky warmth soaked his hair, his clothes, tickled his face like a patient caress. But less than an eternity later this protective weight was pushed aside; he was lifted roughly by the back of his sweatshirt, his sickle was yanked from his slack hand, and there was movement, words being spoken over his head, the flicker of shadows and lights. Everything was slow and syrupy and distant, muffled by a thick blanket of shock.

Reality reasserted itself when he was thrown into a pile of limbs. He reacted to it by screaming.

“ _Shut up!_ ” someone snarled, and he felt a strike across his cheek, but none of that felt like a deterrent to simply making mindless noise. Something acrid and hot was bubbling up in his chest which he would not, could not acknowledge quite yet, and so he drowned it out with his voice.

Hands too small to be adult closed around his arms and mouth, and the surprise of it silenced him. He looked wild-eyed around himself, a mechanic and mostly involuntary reaction, but some information registered: a domed block built in metal plaques, age and rust, wires, buttons, lights, adults dragging another kid in, stumbling in their hurry, scattered hisses, “four minutes left!”, “died—”, “bulgemuncher—”, “then how—”, “whatever—”, “take off already!”—

The module lurched and the pile of children toppled in on itself, pushed down as gravity briefly increased. To Karkat, it felt like an eternity of being forced off-balance on his side, a hand that may or may not have been imagined shoving his head down on a horn. (Much, much later, Karkat would wonder whether the pirates were also pushed down, or if they were used to sudden acceleration shifts. It would be an idle thought, quickly dismissed.) 

The next lurch came with a clang and a jolting halt; the pressure was suddenly gone, and Karkat was bounced up awkwardly before falling on a stray elbow and getting jabbed on the ribs by possibly a horn. The metal rang and shivered under their combined weight.

For a moment Karkat forgot that Crabdad's blood was still caked on his hair and face, raised his head and finally took in the situation — the handful of adults pulling levers, stumbling between panels, sitting down and grumbling, wrapping tape around arms and prosthetics; the pile of limbs in which he was tangled, and which was comprised of fellow children, a fact his subconscious had already recognized but which he'd only just become aware of.

Three pairs of gray eyes stared back at him, as wild-eyed and terrified as he was. From their shirts he picked up some shade of green and maybe a rust, but couldn't quite register which was which before he was dragged out of the pile by his sweatshirt, then into a cramped and dirty hallway — joining a moving line of grim adults, each dragging along a youth of varying age; some kicking and screaming, some sagging in catatonic shock. 

The line snaked around increasingly awful-looking corridors until it scattered in front of the sort of storage room Karkat usually saw in movies. The entrance was framed in rust and grime; Karkat barely registered its stale and ferrous stink, as his attention was wholly directed to the sight of his neighbors — kids he barely knew or interacted with — having their clothes ripped from their bodies and being bodily thrown in the room, along with the shredded remains of their clothing. 

But not with their symbol. _That_ patch of cloth was the first to go, and it would be passed around from hand to hand, from jeer to jeer, until it reached a circle of adults sitting and belching out bawdy songs. There, it would be tossed into the cheerful little fire they had going in a box.

Then came Karkat's turn. An adult grabbed a fistful of his symbol and yanked it out so fast Karkat barely felt the pull, and out came the sleeves, the back, the pants, the shoes. Before cold and shame fully set in, however, a wide rough hand wrapped around his elbow.

“Hey!” shouted a voice somewhere above his head, “I wonder if he bleeds the same _color_ his lusus did?” And something sharp scratched down his arm. 

In any other occasion this would have driven Karkat into a panicked fit, but his surging terror found itself delayed. From the moment his arm was grabbed, his keyed up senses felt a misstep, a break in the rhythm, a dissonant note in whatever messed up song had been playing. The jeering stumbled; the raucous laughter skipped; the bawdy tune lost a cue; the sound of footsteps at his back became syncopated, the traffic of incoming prisoners jammed.

And Karkat was raised by the wrist, his mutant blood beading out and bared for all to see. His feet swung above the filthy floor, and from his vantage point he saw the children as their thousand-yard stares focused on him, and the pirates as they stood frozen mid-choreography. 

The pirate was displaying his arm like he was a freshly hunted beast, and a part of him thought: This is a performance, and I'm just a prop. 

“Well, well, well!” the troll said, his voice gleeful, smarmy, a mockery of villainy. “I wonder if he's also mutated down _there?_ ”

Someone said a knowing _ooooh_ , and it was passed around from pirate to pirate with a jostled elbow here, an emphatic wiggle of eyebrows there. General approval was expressed through clapping; his captor expertly shifted his hold one-handed from Karkat's wrist to his waist, sauntering off while purposefully making Karkat's limbs sway under him. A few other pirates detached from their posts to follow, making a big show of it, dancing a little jig, laughing obnoxiously, high-fiving their companions, and each of them slapped Karkat's bottom as they fell into step behind the two. 

The pirates talked loudly around him — about him and the things they intended to do to him — but everything they said sounded as rehearsed as a movie interrogation, and seemed to slip out of recall almost as soon as it came to his ears.

It was still under that weird feeling of detachment that he was brought into some other block and roughly tossed onto a cold table. A pirate held him down by the shoulders, while his captor made a big show of slowly unzipping his pants and the two others leered at him, arms crossed; that was when the certainty rose in his mind that it was the end of all hope, and he was going to die.

It made him _furious_.

Fingers pried his mouth open and he bit back down with all his rage, tasting blood; he raised his hands and dug his pitiful nails into the wrists holding down his shoulders, even though one of them was metal; hands touched his knees and he kicked, over and over, as fast and hard as he could, and he connected. 

The rape session turned into a mess of hands scrabbling to hold him down as he snarled and punched and kicked and scratched. The next fingers to invade his mouth were cold metal, and biting down made sparks shoot into his mouth; he spit out a phalanx or a tooth into the nearest face, twisted his arm out of a hold and threw a fist and random, kicked at a shape looming above and felt pain shoot up his leg, bared his teeth and bit down with a loud click, _bring out your bulge if you dare_ ; and all the while he was thinking, _I'm going to die_ , and that thought was like fire in his mind and his veins. 

Someone grabbed his hair and knocked his head against the table, and that was the last he knew for a while.

* * *

Consciousness returned in two steps: step one was prying his eyes open and trying to sit up, and step two was rolling on his side and puking copiously. Once finished with these steps Karkat's brain had warmed up enough that he was able to remember who he was (unarmed kid), where he was (pirate ship) and why he was there (kidnapped), and these facts allowed him to logically determine the likely reasons for why every inch of his body hurt so abominably. 

His head was ringing, there was a gap in his teeth, and his ankle was not so much throbbing as it was pulsing, heat and pain creeping up his leg like a foul emanation. It seemed unfair and almost shameful that it hurt worse than his nook, but it did.

He sagged, trying not to look at his spew in case there were colors in it. 

“Hey, man, don't lie on that,” someone said at his back, and a pair of hands tugged him slightly away from the puddle. The generalized ache that was his body intensified momentarily. Overhead a weird, misshapen thing floated over awkwardly and revealed itself as a somewhat tatty piece of cloth; whoever was at his back picked it from the air and spread it over his sick. From his vantage point Karkat identified it as the remains of someone's jeans, with the back pocket still on.

“Thanks,” he mumbled, allowing himself to sag again. It came out sounding more like “fants”, but he chose to assume the meaning came across. He did receive a pat on the arm in response, but it triggered such a cascade of minor pains that in any other case it might have counted as retaliation.

“If you gotta piss or shit or anything, just holler and we'll give you a rag. Or, you know, arrange it in place for you, because _man_ you look so banged up.” Pause. “Wow, that was the worst accidental pun ever. Sorry, man. But yeah, we didn't get a load gaper so we're having to make do with—”

“Dude, shut up, he's not even listening, he's barely even conscious—”

“C'mon, someone's gotta explain the system to him—”

“You just wanna prattle on ‘bout bodily residue, it's like you're fuckin' obsessed with poop or something, the floatin' turd thing stopped being funny like hours ago—”

Karkat thought: I'm naked in a dirty storage block with however many other naked douchebags, covered in my lusus' blood and probably pirate spunk, there's blood and worse in my mouth, my head was bashed and my ankle is broken, but at least my digestive system is safe. The troll body truly is an amazing thing.

“Someone's coming,” said a very small voice, right when Karkat was about to drift off, and the nearly imperceptible background hum of conversation abruptly cut off. He made another attempt at opening his eyes and looking around (this time without any maneuvers involving major muscle groups); the block had no illumination other than a weak, flickering light panel on the front wall, but the turbid half-light managed to trace the contour of... a lot more limbs than he'd originally assumed. 

Then the whole ceiling turned overbright, and he squeezed his eyes shut; the floor vibrated under his cheek, and he heard the rusty screech of the block's doors as they slid open. A musty, unpleasant draft blew on his bare skin.

There was the strange awareness of dislocating air, then a meaty weight fell half on top of him in an unexpected burst of pain. There was a chuckle somewhere past the pain and the screaming — oops, _his_ screaming, he made an effort to bite down — before the floor started vibrating again as the ancient doors closed and the lights went out.

There were a few seconds of stillness.

“We're clear,” said the soft voice. The conversation restarted; a few hands came to clumsily poke at him, adding to his feeble attempts at pushing the weight off. Eventually it was rolled off his ribs and onto the chunk of jeans covering his earlier gastric mishap, and Karkat would have been content to do nothing but breathe and wince at the leftover pain for the foreseeable future if the sudden sting of a spark on his forehead hadn't forced his eyes open.

Beside him, a half-visible troll was twitching violently. Karkat took in two small pairs of horns on his head and in a flash thought _Sollux you utter bastard_ — but no, the body was too small, the horn shape was wrong, the glassy eyes had yellow in them—

That was all he was able to spot before the child rolled his eyes back and started convulsing in a flurry of uncontrolled psychic discharge; golden sparks twisted and crawled over the metal floor like the aftermath of a catastrophic electric device breakdown, and the soiled jeans the kid had been rolled onto caught on fire right under his head.

Karkat was on his ass, holding the kid up and tossing the burning cloth away before his brain was even caught up with the situation. The situation mostly consisted of sparks running over his bruises and making his leg twitch; he half-collapsed back onto the floor, stiff with nerves and the effort of controlling his electrified muscles, and pushed the small psionic's face against his chest.

His hair was matted with yellow blood, half-dried flecks flying out along with the outgoing psychic leakage; Karkat's arms were quivering uncontrollably, stuck to the kid's skin. 

It was like hugging a livewire. Lightning danced up karkat's arm like a hot brand, crawled around his torso in a burning embrace. With a violent effort he pulled his arm from the back of his head, tugging against the clinging sparks, and let it plop on his back. Minor stings showered his chest and palm, leaving numbness in their wake, but he somehow managed to move his hand in slow circles, trying to go for soothing.

“Shhh, I'm sorry, I'm _sorry_ ,” he mumbled through rattling teeth into the sparking mess of crusted, half-gelatinous blood. His face instantly went numb under a flurry of psychic stings, but he didn't move away. He slid his hand back up to scratch the base of the kid's neck, and little by little the convulsive twitching started to let off; the sparks diminished, and the child slowly settled down, his twitches dwindling into isolated quivering. Soon the kid was a dead weight on Karkat's side. 

Karkat finally let his own body sag — with some leftover twitching — and peered down at the unconscious child. He must have been four sweeps old, maybe four and a half at most, and seemed well-fed. That probably wouldn't be the case for long, though, for him and everyone else. But at least Karkat was able to alleviate his psychic freakout. 

If he was going to die soon, then whatever he did right now mattered more than anything. Whether it was spitting in a pirate's face or soothing a psychic breakdown— whichever way he chose to go just... _mattered_. 

Perhaps because he'd overdrawn from already depleted reserves, or maybe because his bruises had been numbed by the flurry of sparks — Karkat let go of the breath he'd been holding and went down almost mid-thought.

* * *

He woke up as soon as the hand touched his shoulder, but was unable to react before its owner had the bright idea of shaking him.

“Uuurrgh,” he croaked, and the hand pulled away hurriedly.

“Um, sorry,” said a voice he didn't recognize, too young to tell whether it was male or female. “Are you, like, alive or something?”

The question seriously deserved a scathing, sarcastic response on the level of “i was chilling in hell until the stink of your unwashed breath forced me to cross the vast beyond and rip through the fabric of reality in order to cram your gullet full of troll mints” but... for once he did not feel up to extended gab-flapping, and also the smell probably couldn't be helped anyway. 

“I'm... sort of alive, but only just, y'know,” mumbled Karkat, trying to shift on the hard floor and giving up halfway. Attempting to move reminded him of the little kid in his arms; after some hesitation he pulled an arm away in order to brush off the buildup of crust and gunk on his eyelids and pinch the bridge of his nose.

“If you're alive enough to chew, they just dumped in some stripes of nasty hard things that may or may not be meat. Here,” and a thick ribbon of sorts was inserted in the gap between his pinching fingers. “One for you and one for your little friend.”

Karkat drew his hand back to stare at the rubbery slices of mystery meat. They were fibrous in a weird way and colored an unappetizing pinkish brown, stuck together so that if one hadn't been slightly smaller than the other they could almost have been mistaken for a somewhat thick slice. An experimental sniff did not yield any conclusions other than that the whole room stank.

He glanced down at the kid in his arms. The boyish face was slack, eyes rolled back and half open in a very alarming way; his two arms were drawn in, wrists curled, fingers tangling in each other. Karkat privately thought he looked like a cluckbeast, and then felt awful for it. He tried wiggling a slice under the kid's nose, then brushing his half-open lips with a frayed corner; the kid twisted his mouth open as if trying to figure out which way his jaw was supposed to go, closed his lips around the meat stripe once, twice, and just... stopped. 

In the end Karkat settled for taking a bite off the ribbon meat, chewing it into a nasty pasty glue, balling it up with his fingers and putting it in the kid's mouth. He at least seemed able to swallow without issue, and allowed himself to be fed the shorter strip and part of the longer before Karkat remembered that was the only food he'd get for who knew how long. 

He chewed his ribbon meat thoughtfully, staring at the kid's completely still and weirdly knotted body. What was he even called? Karkat decided to call him Twitchy. The thing is, he told himself very sternly, the thing _is_ , is that Twitchy doesn't look like he's going to last very long. Even I know a psychic meltdown of that sort is bad news, he argued, swallowing his own nasty pasty ball of spit glue. But... the way his blood is crusted all over his hair, his dad probably died on top of him too, right? 

They were kindred spirits! Yes, they were similar in many ways except for age and caste and possibly something else Karkat didn't know about him, which was literally everything. _That_ was why he felt so compelled to ease Twitchy's final moments instead of giving him a quick and merciful death, and it had nothing to do with some weird codependent urge to comfort his own self by using a nearly inert meatsack as proxy! 

Self-awareness could be such a burden to bear.

Twitchy's breath suddenly hitched, and Karkat's arm tightened around him in startlement before he caught himself. God _damnit_. You know what? He said to himself. Let's do this. Let's pamper the shit out of this dying brat! What have I got to lose? I'm merchandise now. If I'm gonna be a slave I might as well get a headstart on waiting on someone hand and foot! And it's not like he can complain! Who needs consent when you're basically dead?!

“He a friend?” asked Poop Dude, stepping over Karkat's little huddle on his way to his sitting spot.

“Never met this asshole before in my life,” Karkat grumbled, coaxing the last ribbon meat spitball into Twitchy's confused lips.

* * *

Some indefinite amount of time passed in jerks and spurts, during which Karkat alternated between getting to know some of his fellow kidnappees and the futile arrangements they had come up with in order to preserve a figment of dignity, and... sort of blanking out on everything. 

The load gaper arrangements Poop Dude had alluded to— which Karkat soon had to make use of, much to his chagrin— involved discharging his necessities on a chunk of cloth which would then be levitated over everyone's head and towards a particular ventilation grate by one of the psychics in their group. 

The grate was one of several which lay around the room and on the ceiling, some narrow, some square, none big enough for anything other than a grub. One of them sat close to the floor and made a sharp turn downwards, therefore it made a perfect dumping ground for their biological waste. A self-appointed grate-keeper was in charge of opening and closing the grate as needed, and sometimes helping unroll what Poop Dude insistently dubbed “poop burritos”; an older, more skilled psychic would float piss-drenched rags without letting a drop fall on anyone, and mentally squeeze them dry over the dump-hole — a practical but incredibly depressing use of fine skills. 

“Well, I'm good at detail work,” she'd said, bashful despite sitting naked and bruised in a filthy storage block, “not very strong, though.”

As for Grate-keeper, he was a total sport about his unfortunate job.

“I lost my sense of smell a long time ago,” he'd said. “ _And_ I've got all this space for my very own!” He stretched his legs over the patch of floor surrounding said grate. (His knees were still slightly bent when they touched someone else's leg.) “So it's not like I'm under any great duress here. Bring on the shit!”

Shortly after his mental evaluation of the Load Grate as grub-sized, Karkat was dismayed to find out there _was_ actually a grub in their group, a three-horned yellowblood who appeared completely oblivious to the general situation despite sporting a very obvious bruise and missing a front claw. It crawled over legs and torsos, giggling in funny little chitters and cuddling up to exposed backs only to soon shuffle away and leave a cold patch behind. A jadeblood in the group was sort-of in charge of the thing, but mostly followed its exploring with tired, resigned eyes without leaving his place.

“A fucking jade,” Karkat had muttered in disbelief, half to himself. So fucking rare, and yet he knew a whole two of them now. 

“You're pretty unique yourself,” he'd raised a corner of his lips, and the laugh that followed had been just as half-hearted. “In fact, I'd bet we're the most valuable cargo on this ship, and I don't think leaving you in such a state was a smart business decision— but what do I know.”

There was one more in the group who qualified as valuable cargo— a seadweller, of all things. He at least hadn't been another neighbor Karkat had failed to learn about; rather, he'd happened to choose the worst possible night to pay his lowblooded kismesis a visit. Karkat didn't pay him much attention, as he seemed to be an annoying whiner who'd only open his mouth to complain about others trying to find humor in the situation, and seemed to alternate between outrage at the treatment he was getting and gibbering acknowledgement of reality. 

At some point, Karkat checked back in from the painfog and thirst to the sound of his raw voice.

“...like a roarbeast,” he was mumbling, almost respectfully. Curiosity got the best of Karkat; he uncurled from around Twitchy and turned to squint at the guy's huddled form. “Killed three of them, maybe four before they got me—”

Karkat rolled his eyes and curled back around Twitchy. He was getting better at moving despite the aches.

“—thought she was going to shoot through me,” he choked out, to Karkat's surprise. “I still can't believe she didn't... stupid jerk.”

“She's not here, though?” asked the other psychic.

“...no,” the seadweller said, and to Karkat's surprise he didn't burst into tears or anything.

“Well...” the psychic drawled. “I wasn't paying attention, it was kind of a mess, but I'm pretty sure I managed to push one into the wall hard enough to crush some major body parts. Or out the window, which would amount to the same in the end. I don't think this crew would bother with dragging wounded around, or at least not wounded they couldn't sell for profit, I guess.”

There were sage nods all around. Karkat uncurled again, interest picking up.

“My lusus fought harder than me,” said another girl, her dry swallow loud enough to hear. “I hit a jugular and some other dude's major arm artery, but not much else— I mean, when all you have is a knife...” she shrugged. “This big guy though, he was just twisting necks left and right!” she leaned further against her moirail, grinning proudly. 

Said moirail was an incredibly disturbing presence in the group; where most of the captives looked between five and seven sweeps old, he could pass for nine. Perhaps he'd been captured rather than killed because his eyes were still more gray than indigo, and bluebloods were theoretically profitable. Unlike the seadweller he didn't wheedle about unfair treatment, or at all; he just sat at his corner in stoic silence with a hand on his moirail's shoulder. His hair was smushed up on one side where he'd been leaning on the wall. 

“I wasn't much good,” said the soft-voiced girl who warned of incoming visitors. Karkat pegged her as recently-five. “My lusus was already wounded from a previous altercation, and my skills were completely useless. I don't have much to brag about.”

“Mine chopped like two pairs of legs straight out from under them!” someone cheered on the other side of the room. “...they got him on the head though. Fuckers.”

There was a hesitant silence, some uncomfortable shuffling.

“Mine chopped a head off,” Karkat broke the silence, hesitantly. “With a pincer. Then he shielded me with his body. He might have gotten someone else while I was covered, I heard some squishy noises...” 

“Mine was already dead for half a sweep,” said the older psychic girl. “But I crushed a few windpipes before someone got me from the back—”

“They're coming,” said the soft-voiced girl, and sure enough, as silence descended the vibration of footsteps on metal could be felt even before whoever was coming started making noise on purpose. Karkat rolled near on top of Twitchy, even as the logical part of his mind screamed that it was pointless, that there was no way he could hide the kid or overpower anyone who felt like getting rid of him—

“Aaaah, this will be a hard-working one, huh?” someone said, loudly.

“Sure is talented at sucking bulges,” someone else agreed. The doors opened and the lights burned, and Karkat recognized one of the pirates as the one who'd singled him out.

The pirate displicently tossed an unconscious kid into the block, then let his eyes roam over the collection of small naked bodies in intense concentration. Karkat huddled a little closer over Twitchy; the dude was so absorbed, he even forgot to leer. 

“Your turn!” he said at last, grabbing a sleeping kid by the hair. He dangled the crying kid over their heads for no reason, grinned at their flat hopeless expressions, then stepped past his colleague and out the door.

“Be glad, childrens!” said the other pirate, fiddling with some huge canister and a small hose without even bothering to look at them. “Are you thirsty? Not anymore!”

Karkat barely had time to raise himself on an elbow when a spray of water slapped his face. Water! Holy shit! He opened his mouth to catch the drops, licked at the trickles running down his face, but not two seconds later the spray was turned to the other side of the room. 

Oh, shit, what about Twitchy? Karkat looked down, watching him smack his lips weakly at the drops touching his mouth. When he looked back up, the pirate was already rolling the stumpy hose back.

“There you have it!” he said cheerfully, stepping out the door. “Until next time!”

_Motherfucker._

The door smacked close with its usual clang, plunging the room into darkness right when Karkat was in the middle of searching the floor for puddles. Well, shit, whatever, it was probably filthy anyway, it ran over everyone's dirty and bloodied bodies before it even hit the rusty floor—

He slumped down onto cold wetness, breathless, the mental image of his Crabdad's blood running from his hair, down his face and into his lips looping in his mind. 

“They're gone,” said the girl, calm and quiet as if something absolutely horrifying hadn't just happened, and Karkat took a stuttering breath, tried to get over it already, reminded himself that it was nothing and there was worse yet to come. It didn't help.

But despite himself his eyes were getting used to the flickering penumbra again, the weak light by the door growing slightly stronger as whatever equipment was supposed to cut the energy feed failed and leaked.

“Hey, guys, guess what?” the psychic girl whispered, grinning wide. Karkat looked at her upside down, desperate for anything that would take his mind off trails of red blood.

She slowly raised both arms as if she were holding the ceiling, and from the murky near darkness overhead sparkles started to float down in shivering little globes. 

“I didn't get a lot this time,” she said, “but next time I'll be ready!”

Smiling in awed disbelief, Karkat pushed himself up and slid an arm under Twitchy, shifting and angling under a fat descending drop until it floated into his half-open lips. He smacked his tongue a little, squeezed his eyes hard, and twisted his face in what Karkat could swear was an attempt at a smile. 

* * *

It was an inordinately chilly night, and Karkat was sitting in front of his computer cuddling a sack of tubers. This did not seem strange to him at all. 

His front where he held the tubers was warm enough, but his shoulders and arms were cold and he couldn't seem to stop shivering on his chair. Why is it so fucking cold, he wondered to himself, and to complement the thought he typed to Terezi, “it's so fucking cold”. He tried wrapping himself in a second sweatshirt like it was a towel; somehow he managed to wrap it around himself twice and then some, but it made no difference.

Terezi typed back “laughing will warm you right up”, and sent him a link. It led to some sort of forum, and he was looking at a very long, very stupid and very infuriating thread. He knew this even though he kept skipping past the long blur of paragraphs, unable to bring himself to read because it was just so _stupid_. 

He wrote to Terezi, “I can't read this, it's so stupid it hurts,” and she immediately said “no, read it, read it carefully, it really is funny”, but he kept shaking his head and repeating “no, no, it's stupid, it hurts,” hugging his sack of tubers and mumbling, trying to get her to understand, to stop reading the thing, because it really hurt, it hurt for real—

It hurt from his foot up to his entire body, and he woke up with a jolt to find a leg propped on his. Its owner was sitting against the wall, bruised and scratched and bitten and staring blankly into the middle distance; he poked her knee and she startled, lifting the offending leg in surprise. 

“Oh!” she blinked at him, as if struggling to focus. “Oh— oh. Sorry.”

She folded the leg into herself, sagged against the wall and went back to staring at nothing.

A fair number of them would slip into these fugues now and then. Even Karkat found himself missing chunks of memory sometimes— though he expected nothing much had happened during that lost time anyway, what with them being stuck in a dark room with a whole lot of nothing to do except shit in the remains of their own clothes. And they were running out of shit.

He inspected his sack of tubers. Twitchy remained as unresponsive as ever, though now the entire left side of his face was twisted and contorted into some weird mask: his teeth were exposed, his eyelid was pulled open, and the half-seen globe of his rolled up eye twitched in patterns as if following an unheard beat.

Not very long then, he thought, and a profound sense of despair welled up inside of him. What was the use? Why bother? He rolled back with full intention of asking the closest person to twist his and Twitchy's necks and just get it over with, but a sudden sense of disorientation scrambled his thoughts. 

A moment's thought, and he was sure this was not the spot he'd fallen asleep on. 

The room was still the same, of course, but everyone else except for Grate Keeper seemed to have shuffled positions. Against the wall nearly at his back was a line of kids, some battered and moaning, some with rags still hanging off their horns to dry from the water spray; closer to the door, some of the older kids talked in low voices, laughing nervously every now and then. 

One of them turned around and spotted Karkat leaning on an elbow, squinting into the half-light.

"I hope you don't need to pee," he said— Poop Dude, then. "It's Pee Girl's turn on the rape table now."

"Oh god, could you _not_ call her that," said the seadweller kid, now relocated to the corner on the side of the door. "Have some respect for the poor girl at least, she can save up drinkable water too, call her Water Girl or something instead. That's nice and euphemistic."

Poop Dude made a face. "That's _boring_."

Nobody mentioned the fact that they each had actual names they went by, of course. At some point, Karkat wasn't entirely sure when, a non-verbal agreement had been reached not to; having lived in the same area, some of the kids in the group had not been in amicable terms. Apparently, by not acknowledging they knew who was who, past skirmishes could be more easily ignored. 

That, and you could make believe all this bullshit was happening to someone else.

Karkat flopped back down, shivering. "Was there a point to changing places, though," he mumbled, and only belatedly noticed he'd spoken out loud.

"They won't step away from the door," said Soft Voice, from somewhere nearby. She was sitting close to Twitchy's legs, half-turned to look at him. 

"Who?"

"The adults."

Karkat sagged. He wasn't entirely sure he got the implications — his mind felt fuzzy around the edges — but part of him was still relieved.

"Is that the mutant?" asked a thick, low voice, and Karkat whipped his head up in its direction.

It was the oldest kid, the indigo-blue dude. His hair was slightly more groomed, perhaps finger-combed by his moirail; they'd also relocated, from the corner to the middle of the wall. Karkat had intended to spit "what is it to you" and maybe deliver a finger salute, but the sight of the lanky and muscled form, head and shoulders above the others despite sitting in an awkward huddle, filled his veins with cold. 

"You were unconscious at the time," Indigo continued, completely unperturbed. "And your ankle looked nasty, so we decided not to wake you up. Our friend relocated you instead."

Karkat followed Indigo's pointing finger towards one of the older kids by the door. The slouching figure glanced up, gave a belated and very half-hearted wave, then went back to frowning at the ground. 

"As our Herald said, the pirates are unwilling to step very far into the room," said Indigo, his teeth peeking through a half-smirk. "All their victims were in reach of the entrance, at most a step or two inside. Except for you, of course."

"Except for me," Karkat repeated, numbly. 

"So we reached both a conclusion and a consensus," he says, almost smug. "The conclusion was that the pirates are _afraid of us_. They won't expose themselves to the danger of standing alone in a room full of angry psychoactive kids."

Karkat's brain stopped mid-wobble to consider this completely ludicrous, yet somehow not entirely impossible fact.

"The consensus was to keep the weak and the wounded away from the doors and out of immediate sight, to avoid repeat victims."

"Yeah, and make sure everyone gets their turn being fucked up the waste chute," rasped Slouchy dude, in a voice so hoarse it sounded like a pained whisper, and Karkat suddenly noticed that all along he'd been furiously _sulking_. 

"C'mon man, are you seriously suggesting setting up the little 'uns as scape-bleatbeasts?" asked the one sitting by him, poking Slouchy with the stump of an elbow.

"The older ones can take the heat," Slouchy rasped again— either he was coming down with something, or his voice box was damaged. (Him being one of the older kids made those words either very brave or very reckless.)

"Speak for yourself," said a troll with bushy hair. "I'm scared to death!"

"We've been through this," said the seadweller, gesturing impatiently with a hand. "If our count was right then our greatest advantage lies in numbers. We also need the strength of our older members. Spreading the damage is thinning the damage—"

"Easy for you to say," retorted Slouchy, now redubbed Raspy, "you're in the safest spot—"

"They'll definitely take their frustration against the ruling castes out on him," argued Indigo. "We can't risk it."

"I missed this count," Karkat said, turning to Soft-Voice. "What's this about?"

"We were trying to determine how many pirates are crewing this ship," Soft-voice said, turning to face Karkat more fully. "There's a chance they're not much more numerous than us."

"You're just sucking up," accused Raspy, slouching a little further into a ball of resentment. 

"Is this a battle plan you're cooking, then?" Karkat asked.

"It's still very half-assed," she admitted, primly.

"I can sit over there," said the seadweller, almost challengingly, pushing up to his feet only to be pulled back down by the Grubsitter.

The hum of conversation was growing progressively louder as trolls started to pitch in their own comments, most of them variations on "this is unnecessary", "I agree with XYZ", "Seadwellers suck" and "not his fault". Twitchy was starting to, well, twitch, and Karkat took the time to soothe him a bit, caress the back of his neck, attempt to massage the twisted muscles on his face back into place, as well as the clawed arm and fingers on the opposite side; once Twitchy seemed somewhat settled, Karkat laid him back on the floor and pushed himself up, grunting and wincing, enough to look at his peers from more or less eye-level. 

He was cold, his head felt tight, his muscles were tense and aching, his ankle had swollen into a huge mottled ball of throbbing — but the sight of a room full of much more kids than he'd initially assumed was... worth it, in a way. They were all surprisingly energetic; even the previously dozing and blank kids were trying to get a word in edgewise. He took a deep, revitalizing breath, full of the smell of sweat, fear and waste, and cleared his throat with a small cough.

" _Everyone, shut the_ _ **fuck**_ _up!_ " he screamed; surprise made nearly everyone comply. "You, shoosh!" he pointed. "You too, yeah, you! Shut up! And you! Okay! Thank you." He sighed and let his arm drop, turning to Indigo. "Let me see if I have this straight. _In theory_ , we thinned their numbers down there in such a way that they literally cannot afford to risk a single fucking asshole in here, am I right?"

"Pretty much," nodded Indigo, smiling a little. 

"And we _don't_ have a guard out the door, right?" Karkat turned to Soft-voice.

"No," she said. "Not in eighty yards around this room, which is the limit of my empathy's reach. But the doors and walls seem to be equipped against blast fire," she added. 

Karkat's eyebrows went up. So they'd have to force their way past the food and/or water assholes?

"I still think we should just storm out and take on these fuckers," Raspy mumbled under his breath. "Blow out the doors and give them hell."

"In the middle of sidereal space?" Karkat asked, incredulously. "Sure, if we're going for a last stand with a side dish of taking 'em along to hell. But—" he turned back to Indigo with a pointed finger. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but these guys can't conduct business in the vacuum of space, can they?"

The room's collective attention went from Karkat to Indigo, whose little smile kept threatening to widen. 

"I wanted to sit on this for a little longer," he confessed. "Wait until they let something slip on the matter. But unless they have a transportalizer — and I doubt they do — there's literally no way they can exchange merchandise somewhere without viable atmosphere. We're probably flying to some unofficial space station—"

"Incoming," said Soft-voice, her eyes staring into the floor as she concentrated. A hush fell into the room. The footsteps became louder.

Karkat squinted preemptively and wasn't completely blinded when the lights popped on; thanks to such forethought, he was able to witness the look of utter, victorious glee in the face of the smug pirate before it wavered, twisted and came back as if under duress. 

For _some_ reason, he was flanked by two other ostensibly bored but armed pirates. 

He tossed the limp figure of Water Girl into the room with badly-hidden difficulty; her lanky body flopped onto one of the other adolescents around the door, who fell back under her weight with a noise like a sackful of elbows. He turned his fixed smile into the room with awkward intensity, scrutinizing the back wall and the small groups of kids that had agglutinated here and there. They were all awake and alert, staring back; the room as a whole emanated a very strong aura of being unimpressed.

Finally, after way too long and awkward a pause, the pirate said, with smarm so forced it was almost embarrassing:

"She liked our bulges so much, she even went ahead and told us who'd like to eat them next!"

And he set _one single foot_ into the room, stretching his arm and groping Raspy's horn at random.

Karkat expected Raspy to blow him up, along with the two guards and the rest of the corridor, perhaps in a single eyeblast like Sollux often claimed to be able to do. But he let himself be dragged off instead, even as his face twisted into an angry grimace; right before the door closed and the lights cut off, Raspy managed to glare in Indigo's general direction.

The footsteps went faint, turning into scuffle sounds right before they faded away. Everyone waited for Soft-voice's go-ahead to break the customary post-visit silence.

"He was disappointed!" she soon blurted out, excitedly. Indigo and a few other kids perked up, looking inordinately pleased; but before any of them could open their mouths Water Girl's apparently unconscious body bounced to its feet like a rubber band.

"One pirate down!" she announced to the room, grinning wide and wild; the cell once again erupted in excited voices, followed by excited shooshing. 

"You go first!" said a girl, pointing to Water Girl with the sharp remains of her prosthetic arm. Water girl exchanged a look with Indigo, and then stepped over children until she found a free spot to sit on. 

"So you guys know how they basically knock you out first thing?" she asked cheerfully as soon as she was settled. "Well—"

"They do?" Karkat blurted out. "They didn't with me until I spat a tooth on some dude's face!"

"They did it to literally everyone after you," said Indigo, looking like this particular bit of trivia filled him with immense satisfaction. "I'd say someone in their reprogrammation crew is afraid of teeth. But do go on," he said, turning to Water girl.

She laughed impishly, tossing a bit of fringe back. "Well... I blocked most of the impact and let them think I was out!" She rubbed her hands evilly.

"But what did you mean by one pirate down?" asked a kid with corkscrew horns sitting by her. "Did you manage to kill someone? Did they punish you for it?"

"Did you just lie there while they fucked you?" asked the seadweller, looking mildly horrified.

"It's not the first time I played unconscious while I was fucked," she said, shrugging with alarming indifference. "But I kid you not: after hitting the back of my head they just dumped me on a table and started playing cards and imbibing on soporifics. Their little ringleader wasn't around and they just weren't—" she broke into giggles— "they weren't _feeling it!_ " 

"That's the guy with rotund hips, right?" asked the girl with the broken prosthetics. "The ringleader?"

"Pretty much, yeah," Water Girl confirmed. "He walked in a couple hours late and was _totally_ into fucking me, only speaking as the one on the receiving side his game was super weak. Then he used a dagger handle to rough me up down there a little harder than his bulge was up to, slapped me around a little, and said it was because some extra pain would make me— ahem— _imagine the worst_. So..." she shrugged one shoulder, affecting nonchalance, "I chose the drunkest looking asshole and blocked the main artery that went into his head. They thought he passed out from the booze."

Stupefied silence followed this claim. Here and there a couple of kids nodded to each other, looking impressed, but generally there was a feeling of sharing a room with someone who had a very small and harmless tool they could wield in many creatively fatal ways. 

Karkat found himself breaking the ice. "Detail work?" he asked, going for light-hearted quip but sounding dubious and hesitant instead.

"You could say that!" She wiggled her eyebrows, thankfully taking Karkat's words in the spirit they were intended. "Also, whichever racket you guys started here carried all the way there, so— one, we might want to keep it down in the future, and two," she pointed to Indigo, "they're _definitely_ hoping to generate infighting among us. The Ringleader just about pissed himself in glee when he felt the noise, the gloating was ridiculous."

Indigo's smirk was small, but terrifying. It was the look of someone about to say _jackpot_.

" _Very_ interesting," he said instead. "Did you kill the pirate outright, or just disable him?"

"Disable," she said, suddenly very businesslike. "Shaking your drunken friend awake to find he's a drooling vegetable causes a much bigger impression than a sudden death. If they're superstitious they'll assume it's a curse, and if not they'll assume one of us is carrying disease. The target never touched me, so I won't be suspected, but those who shared one of us with him will be put under scrutiny. Either way, it'll bring down enemy morale."

"Good," he said, nodding, and then shifted uncomfortably on his huddle. "I think I might as well share my conclusions then. Like she said, they're trying to generate infighting. Everything, from exposing the mutant to withholding water and tossing the food into the room in a clump, is calculated to make us degenerate into snarling beasts."

"But we haven't," said the seadweller.

"That's because they _suck_ ," clarified Indigo. "Did you see the look in the leader's face? That man expected to find a bloodbath when he opened this block. Hoped, even. And I know exactly what he thinks is going on in here— I was recently granted Instructional Fleet Cohabitation Modules and low-grade access to their trainee intranet, and..." he waved an arm vaguely, his face shifting through an interesting configuration of winces before he blurted out a laugh, "they think we're the same as _fantasy woofbeasts_."

Someone snorted, but the general atmosphere was one of confusion. 

"Are you sure it's not just a case of people turning into frothing retards online?" asked Karkat, taking pity on his grimaces.

"That too," he said, making a face that may or may not have been related to his moirail poking around at his ribs. "But... there's really no good way to say this. The modules compare the troll race to the... "stratified nobility" of wild woofbeasts, I assume for propaganda and morale purposes, but the language is very, very outdated. Outdated enough that the members of the intranet think the modules are being literal. They accept as fact that every group of trolls assigned together will enter a period of griefing in order to coalesce into a "pack", and that this pack will have an "alpha" as its undisputed leader, a "beta" who is second-best and strives to replace the alpha, and so on and so forth— until the omega, who is the weakest, lowest and most despised member of a pack, existing only to relieve its buildup of aggression by becoming its target. My sign actually received demerits from a moderestrainer when I pointed out that woofbeasts don't work that way."

"How do you know all that?" asked one of the unfortunate children sitting by Grate Keeper.

His moirail answered instead. "My lusus was one," she said, sounding more affronted than mournful. "We lived in a wandering pack, not a hive. They didn't give a flying fuck about politics or nobility, and changed duties according to the occasion. They also defended their young and weak, so hell if I know where this notion of "omega" came from. Whichever woofbeasts the module writers studied must have been sick and mad."

"What does this woofbeast situation has to do with us, though?" asked a kid with a scar over his nose.

"Well," said Indigo, "for starters, they tried to set the Mutant up as the omega."

" _What!?_ " Karkat sputtered indignantly. "Why, I'll omega their unwashed purulent faces right in— _with my teeth!_ "

Another racket followed Karkat's reaction, mostly comprised of laugher and agreement. Someone leaned over for a high-five, which he graciously provided, and a small kid at his back poked his shoulder with an offered fist for bumping purposes. Soon the noise was overtaken by people trying to shoosh each other, loud enough that it was just as likely to be heard by their captors as the previous noise was. 

On the floor, Twitchy did his thing, jerking in little spurts and sparks. Karkat hastily attended to him only to watch as his cramped face seemed to untwist, his limbs moving uncertain but not as stiff, his muscles not as obviously bunched. A little laugh escaped Karkat's throat; he added his own shoosh to the surrounding buzz, hesitantly brushing fingers against the child's hairline, and it seemed to him that Twitchy was trying to turn his head into the touch. Flecks of dried blood fell onto his forehead, and Karkat hurried to brush them off. 

Indigo coughed in his fist, and Karkat yanked his hand back as if he'd been burned. Did the guy look bashful, or was it just his imagination? His moirail had laid her head on his lap, but maybe he was actually in the process of jumping to dumb conclusions.

"Anyway," said Indigo, when the generalized shooshing had mostly subsided, "like I said, they tried to induce infighting through the make-believe pack method by pushing someone into the omega role and accelerating the process... probably. The thing is, I don't think that was the initial plan at all."

"Oh, it totally wasn't," said the kid with the elbow stump, perking up. "If you saw their faces—"

"Everyone was stumped!" a kid raised his arms, suddenly cheerful. "If it was a televised series, that's when they'd play a funny _doik_ sound."

"It was kind of hilarious in hindsight, yeah—" laughed another kid.

"I was already in the room at the time, but I could tell something was wrong—"

Seadweller was in the middle of a coughing fit, but still raised a thumb in confirmation.

"I was one of the last in and wasn't there to see it happen, but even I could tell there was a conflict of interests going on up ahead in the line," said Indigo. "Everything just _jammed_."

"So—" Seadweller coughed a bit more, then spat into a rag before continuing. "You sayin' that asshole came up with the idea on the spot, and screwed with the _actual_ plan?" 

Indigo leaned his chin on his hand, his eyes narrowed. "What I'm _saying_ is, there's a conflict out there between Ringleader and the _actual leader_ of these pirates, whoever they are."

A soft murmur rose around the room at this revelation. Behind Karkat, a kid whispered: "But I thought that guy was the pirate boss?" Hissing commentary was passed from mouth to ear. This changed things.

Not everyone shared in the surprise, though. Most of the older teens smirked indulgently in the dimness, but Seadweller and Soft-Voice were also completely unmoved, and a handful of the younger kids, too, seemed amused by the general reaction. Karkat himself wasn't all that surprised; he hadn't thought about it at all, but if he had he wouldn't have pegged the guy as their leader anyway. He couldn't inspire respect or fear in a bunch of naked kids, much less in dressed adults. It felt like being told something he already knew but had momentarily forgotten.

Indigo waited until the information was fully processed and the attention had returned to him before continuing. "He must have thought of the plan as soon as he recognized the Mutant as such," he said. "He assumed we'd despise him by default, so he singled him out as publicly as possible, and dragged him away first to cement that position in our minds. But he didn't expect the mutant to bear the indignity of exposure so bravely. And he didn't expect the mutant to fight back, since his strategy since then has been to knock everyone unconscious first thing."

He nodded gravely to Karkat, who nodded back and wisely failed to clarify the fact that he hadn't reacted out of shock, and fought back because of a death wish.

"The next is mostly guessing," he continued, "though I'm pretty confident I have that man pegged. Once he brought the mutant back, he expected us to believe his account of a cowardly, pathetic, disgusting victim, not knowing we had an empath who could tell right away that he was angry and frightened—" he nodded to Soft-voice "—as well as obviously lying. So, having dumped the "omega" unconscious and unprotected in our midst, he expected us to attack him in order to "sublimate our anger and fear"—"

"—so _that_ was what was up with that crazy-ass speech he spouted that one time!" said Grate Keeper, his first words after who knew how long.

"What speech?" asked Karkat.

"You were asleep," said one of the kids behind him, a tired looking girl curled over her knees. "It was after they dumped you here and dragged Corkscrew off. When he brought her back he started going on about how awful we were for torturing "the brat" when in the end we'd all be brought as low as "the brat", blah blah—"

"We didn't even touch anyone, so it made no sense at the time," said another kid by her, the one with the vague eyes. She seemed a lot more focused. "We'd just been talking about what to do and how to share the food if they gave us any, or whether to fight back if given the opportunity. There was a lot of arguing, yeah, and it was tense, but no one started anything. Guess he was talking about you."

"Was there a point to that speech too?" asked a little voice from somewhere farther in the middle of the room. "Or was he just, you know, uh."

"Gloating?" another little voice helped.

"Yeah, that." the first voice confirmed. It was frighteningly young.

"Probably," said Water Girl. "He was probably trying to make one group blame the other for inciting the attack that didn't happen, like you do."

"And from there," added Indigo, "if we were acting according to the fake woofbeast theory, a great fight would have taken place, several of us would have died, the remaining would have divided into opposing factions, and each group would be uneasily held together as its members vied for middle ranks. And then I assume their intention was to incite constant strife among these groups in order to keep our energy and attention constantly occupied, keeping the factions leaders from joining forces as alpha and beta as per their silly theory. Which is why they always toss the fake fleshstripe into our room in one big clump: they hope one group will hoard the food supply and force the other to attack."

"That's stupid," someone muttered. Karkat was inclined to agree. If anything, the moment someone tried to hoard the ribbons they'd be drawn and quartered and eaten themselves. Even if a food hoarding clique was formed, it'd have to be big enough to fend everyone else off, and if you were going to stretch the food among that many people you might as well go the extra mile and make nice with everyone.

"Knowing this, their next step isn't hard to predict." Indigo lowered his voice, as if the plan were a secret he didn't want the anti-blast-fire doors to overhear, or perhaps because his moirail had fallen asleep. "We're always quiet and still when a pirate shows up, which must have that guy very confused by now— but eventually he'll assume the "factions" have already joined under some very strong leadership. And since I'm both the oldest and biggest in this room, he's sure to assume the "alpha" is me. Now," he raised a finger, "since this is the opposite of what he was going for, his next step will be to destabilize my supposed rule. And that means he'll soon try to negotiate with some of us."

"And what do you propose we do?" asked one of the older teens, in a challenging tone. "Like seriously, how is any of this bullshit going to help? They've got us wrong but we're still locked in a room naked in space with what amounts to squeakbeast rations."

"True, true," said another. Some agreement was raised in subdued mumbles; even Karkat turned to the random kid at his side to say "Couldn't have said it better myself". Water Girl seemed to disagree, though; she sighed, and the motion of her horns could maybe be interpreted as an eyeroll. Others just snickered. Someone said a belated "Oh!". Far on his corner, Seadweller coughed under his breath, then raised his hand and started snapping his fingers for attention.

"Hey, hey," he said, audible but still hushed as the noise died. "Guys, I get that ya'll lowbloods and don't usually deal in politics and backstabbery, but really. If they do negotiate with us it means they're literally givin' us cards ta play with. The cards will be shitty 'cause they're the ones dealin' and don't want us to win, but what the Big Guy here is sayin' is that they're under the impression we got one set of cards when we got a _whole damn other_."

"Yup," said one of the other teens, one of those who'd snickered. "We know most of their hand, but they barely know any of ours. If we can turn this game into poker, we've got a major advantage."

Indigo nodded slowly as they spoke, then turned to the questioner. "I propose we continue as we are and let them attempt negotiation." His attention turned to the rest of the room, and he seemed to grow more excited as he spoke. "He'll probably approach one of you during torture, offering relief or extra rations in exchange for spying or information on me and my supposed methods, so we should probably come up with a consistent lie. Don't worry about mind-readers, if there was one the actual leader would be using them already. The moment he begins negotiating, that's when we'll know he's run out of ideas."

"Well, not really," said Water Girl. "He might decide to single the supposed insider out and generate more infighting. I expect the first couple attempts to just be excuses to manufacture another _ohmiga_ among us."

"Omega," corrected Indigo.

"Whatever," she shrugged. "Anyway, it'll just be the same old strategy from a different angle, he's dumb enough to keep following an expired plan— so yeah, it'll be our sign that he's stumped."

"He could implant a transmitter bug on someone," someone from the group around the door pointed out. 

"Bugs are hard to hide on a naked person," she said, again shifting into professional lecture mode. "They need to be big enough to absorb, process and emit sound waves, and that's about half a thumb even on the most advanced models. Also, the way they affix to their targets is hella painful on the skin. There's no way to install one on an unknowing target's actual body, even if you were to knock them unconscious and stick it under their skin, or up their nook. Not to mention," she smirked ruefully, "It wouldn't pick up any sounds from the inside of a nook."

"What about someone's hair?" asked Karkat. The older kids again turned to him, and he swallowed down his unease to complete his thought. "Or near the root of a horn, without touching the skin. If someone has fluffy enough hair to cover the root-pads, it could go by unnoticed...?" He hunched a little under the feeling of scrutiny. "W-well, I suppose you could just fondle your horns when you leave to make sure nothing's stuck on them, and if you're unconscious someone else could do it, what's even some extra groping when you've just dealt with those assholes—"

Water Girl started nodding as he spoke, exchanging looks with the scattered group of planners that seemed to have formed. "No, good call," she said. "It couldn't affix to hair, but it could probably affix to a horn."

"We should arrange some signs in case anyone thinks they were bugged, or knows they were bugged," said another of the planning kids, very businesslike, "like maybe pointing to your ear, your mouth, and then to where the bug is. Just nobody try to pull one out, it's easier to kill a bug than to open its pincers."

"Oh, yeah!" Karkat was starting to warm up to the idea of becoming one of the strategists in the room. "And we could stage some dumb argument before killing the bug so they'll think it was squashed in a fight! Like smack the floor to make punching sounds, shout, scream like you're in pain, the whole shebang—"

"How likely are these pirates to even use bugs, anyway?" he was interrupted by an irritable-looking girl; she was leaning against the wall opposite, hugging her knees with an arm and gesticulating with the other.

"Hardly," said Indigo, frowning to himself. "They don't seem equipped for spying missions, or else they'd have— yeah. But there's no harm in covering our bases." He leaned back against the wall. "Going back to our plan, the most important thing we need to determine right now is whether they have a transportalizer or not. If they do, they could sell us off one by one, and there's not much we could do about it. If not, they have no choice but to stop somewhere and either let their customers in, or send us out. I'm betting on the latter. Letting a stranger in your ship is risky business."

"But how will we know if they have a transportalizer?" asked one of the smaller kids.

Soft Voice was the one to answer.

"When someone is taken away and doesn't come back," she said, her whisper somehow perfectly audible and incredibly grim.

* * *

The conversation died quickly after that. Without anything else to engage his mind with, Karkat couldn't seem to ignore the ache and discomfort he was under; his joints creaked with the cold, his bruises still complained at every movement, the shallow cut on his arm itched, and the swollen ball of his ankle was crisscrossed with streaks in colors his body should not be capable of producing. His head rang with a low-grade, insidious thrum, rattling painfully at each sneeze, and every time he swallowed against the dryness in his mouth, the gap in his teeth became impossible to ignore. 

He found himself drifting off and on, though whether in sleep or daze he couldn't tell. In his arms, Twitchy seemed to have shifted from all-over contortionism to localized bending; more than once he was startled awake by the poking of a small finger stubbornly twisting the wrong way, and had to fight to push it back in place. 

Other times he was awakened by an uncomfortable warm puddle spreading under his hip. Apparently Twitchy's body discharged its waste whenever it felt like and gave no fucks to hygiene. 

Sometime later the Ringleader brought Raspy back and dragged Stumpy off; his companion provided them with another short-lived spray of water, and once the door was closed Water Girl made herself even more popular by lowering a big blob of it from the upper vents— big enough that Karkat could even hold his share in his cupped hands, and let it trickle through his fingers into Twitchy's lips. 

"I've got some more stashed up there for emergencies," she said. "I'm thinking we could build a cache in case they try to starve us out. But I'm going to need help keeping it up."

Several volunteers stepped up to hold the water cache, and in the end it was decided they'd do it one at a time, in shifts. Raspy woke up and there was another big discussion as he was brought up to date, but Karkat ended up sleeping for most of it— and once awake, he was for a short but very alarming span of time convinced he was surrounded by party crashers in some mystery event he was trying to avoid. 

In his own hive.

What.

"Teach me," Raspy said eventually, the intensity in his harsh whisper wiping away the clinging dregs of Karkat's meandering delusion. "Show me how to kill them silently."

"It's not like you'll be picked up again," Water Girl argued, her voice defensive. "And shouldn't you be sitting on the other side of the room?"

"I have a big range," he rasps. "I could do it at a distance. Just tell me what to do."

"Even beyond the anti-blast walls?" her voice was dubious.

"They're anti-blast. Not anti-psych. I'm running a spark outside." His rasp grew harsher. "Nine feet wide, eighteen long to the right until we hit the first intersection. I can map a corridor. I could map a body. Tell me where to squeeze."

"Map the corridor!" someone whispered. "Dude, that's important! We need to know where to run!"

"If we kill them all from here, we could just _walk_." is all Raspy says.

"I feel you," said Indigo's moirail, her voice slightly muffled by the distance. "But we don't know if they'd start selling us off before we're done, or if they'd figure it out, and if that happens we _really_ might need to run."

"I want them to _die_ ," he says, and the frustration is palpable in his toneless whisper.

"Is it okay if they're killed by someone else, then?" someone asked, her voice vaguely recognizable as one of the teenagers around the door. "I can't map a corridor and I don't know my range, but they haven't picked me yet..."

In the end, Water Girl conceded to teach a group of unspoiled volunteers if Raspy concentrated on his mapping; one of the smaller kids hesitatingly asked to learn how to map, and Raspy hesitatingly acceded to teach.

Eventually Ringleader showed up again, dragging Stumpy under an arm like he usually did when he wanted to appear particularly dismissive of a victim. The lights woke Karkat up from an empty, unrestful dream, and he squinted blearily at the troll. 

There was something different about him, and it wasn't just the two flunkies he'd taken to walking around with; from the look on his face, he seemed to have thought of a bright new idea he couldn't wait to put in practice. 

Ringleader dumped Stumpy's unconscious body on someone else as usual, then ran his beady eyes over the rest of the room.

"Now who shall I pick tonight?" he said, stroking his chin theatrically. "Hmm... you. You over there."

His finger trained vaguely onto Karkat.

Karkat's innards turned into a jagged lump of ice, and it froze him straight to the marrow. But even delayed, his muzzy brain pointed out that there was no way he could stand and walk on his foot, and there was no way the guy was stepping any further into the room; he slumped back over Twitchy's unresponsive body, daring the man to come drag him out, and thanks to this foresight he was only figuratively floored when Soft-Voice rose to her feet.

The troll unveiled a nasty row of ungroomed teeth. "Yes, _you_ ," he said, focusing on her. Considering his track record, he had probably been pointing at random. Considering Soft-Voice's track record, she was probably aware of it. He still wanted to jump, to push her back down and out of view as if it would be of any help.

Something tickled Karkat's mind— a sensation, a thought, the abstract notion of a placating hand on his shoulder; he watched transfixed as she stepped over legs on the way to the door, quiet and dignified and betrayed only by a fine tremor of fingers. Then that awful, gross, stupid asshole wrapped his paw on the back of her neck in a mockery of friendliness and walked sedately out of view, smirking at the rest of them all the time.

One of his flunkies sprayed them again, snickering under his breath, and then the door closed with a clang, sinking the room back into darkness; their footsteps faded away as usual, and perhaps half a minute later so did the feel of that placating, quieting hand in his mind. 

The room remained silent for once. Looks were exchanged in the half-light. Karkat glanced at Water Girl, who seemed lost in thought as she distributed water blobs across the room, and then at Indigo, who was in the process of being papped awake by his moirail. 

"Vati!" she whispered, as anxious and lost as the rest of the room. "Vati, wake up, they took Herald!"

He woke up slowly, blinking grime and squinting at the room in confusion before suddenly straightening up.

"What? _What?_ " he put his hands to his face, rubbing at his eyes with huge square fingertips; for a second he seemed just as young and helpless as the rest of them. 

"He pointed at the girl and she went," said Seadweller, his voice hoarse and miserable enough that he didn't even try affecting his shitty accent. Karkat had suspected it for a while, but the hoarseness and subsequent coughing fit confirmed; the kid was coming down with something. Fuck, he'd bet everyone was, and the gills were just making it worse for him.

"Herald?" he asked, still struggling with confusion. "Okay, what— how— he pointed and—?"

Water Girl took over. "He pointed to the middle of the room and forced one of us to go to him. We didn't count on that." She frowned at the floor. "There's no way of knowing what he'd do if nobody moved. They didn't have any weapons out, but that doesn't mean anything. Her taking the initiative may have saved us."

The teenagers clustered around the door looked as ashamed and angry as if they'd been socially snubbed. Quiet sniffles could be heard here and there in the gloom. Indigo pinched the bridge of his nose for a long moment, then straightened with a sigh.

"On the one hand this means we can't control the damage as we originally intended to," he said, finally. "On the other hand... nothing's really changed on his side. He's still not getting any new info. He really has no recourse but to start negotiating."

"Or one of us could do it," said one of the older teens, a wide-horned boy who in different circumstances might have grown up to be the newest fever in imperial media. "Offer to spy or control the others in exchange for whatever dumb luxury they think would buy us."

"I don't think that would work," said the irritable-looking girl, looking less irritable and more worried. "If we're the ones to approach, then we'd have to give something first, and there's nothing to offer."

"How about fake information?" the boy insisted.

"On what?" asked one of the bug specialists. "Our movements? Weapons? We know he wants to mold our behavior, but we're not supposed to. If he figures out we're smarter than he is there's no telling what he'll do."

"The advantage of having him be the ones to approach us," started the Grubsitter, quietly and unexpected after his long silence, "is that it puts the burden of payment on him rather than us. And if he wants any of us to show compliance, he needs to pay upfront or we'd have no reason to."

"But what if he threatens one of us instead?" insisted Widehorns.

Karkat had barely been paying attention to the ongoing discussion; after Soft-Voice left with the Asshole he'd been overcome with the desire to be consumed by a black hole, and laid unmoving on Twitchy's chest half hoping one would pass by. But Widehorns' question momentarily pulled him out. 

"What would they even threaten us with?" he mumbled, half-distracted by the stuttering sound of Twitchy's pumpbiscuit. "There's nothing to take away and no indignity we won't be put through eventually anyway."

There was no answer, and Karkat didn't feel like sitting up to watch his reaction. 

"Holy shit," said Widehorns suddenly, and the tone of it was all wrong: it had way too much wonder in it, and not nearly enough despair.

Water Girl burst into snickers. "Yes, well..." she sobered up a little. "Maybe we should wait for Herald, see if he came up with anything new on that front."

Indigo made an indistinct noise of agreement, and from the small pockets of conversation that started rising around the room, the topic was collectively deemed over. Karkat had no particular reason to add to the general muttering; he was tired and aching and heartsore, and fell back into delirious daymares without even trying.

It felt like he'd barely closed his eyes when he was suddenly awake again, startled into attention by a vague awareness, a warning presence behind his ear telling him to brace himself—

The cold metal floor vibrated with the progressively louder sound of approaching footsteps; he closed his eyes, and the darkness behind his eyelids suddenly grew red.

He squinted and watched as Soft Voice walked in, her arms crossed tight and stiff under the tatty, grimy jacket thrown over her shoulders. Ringleader waved cheerfully to her back, his lips stretched into a mockery of a smile, and closed the door without stepping inside or picking anyone. The light faded into penumbra; Soft Voice stood at the door, eyes closed, listening to the footsteps as they grew faint.

Then her eyes snapped open, and she uncrossed her arms to reveal the coils of ribbon feed wrapped around her wrists.

"We negotiated," she said, as softly as ever.

She started to unroll the food-ribbons from her arms, as methodically as if she were unrolling yarn. Even now her movements were casually dignified, as small and economic as her voice.

"I don't have enough for everyone," she said, first of all, glancing at Indigo, Water-Girl and Raspy's group in turn. "How should I distribute it?"

"Kids first," said Raspy right away.

"To the wounded!" said Indigo.

Water Girl shook one shoulder. "Both, I guess?"

Soft-voice nodded gravely. "Both," she repeated, navigating her way daintily between crossed legs.

"So..." Water Girl asked, hesitantly, when she walked by. "How did it go over there? How did you manage this?"

"I thought maybe I could make him interested in my abilities," she said, too matter-of-factly to fit her usual unassuming tone. "So I acted meek and weak and frightened, and they chose to keep me awake to see me cry. And when they started, I let them feel what I felt, but worse."

She started handing pieces of the ribbon feed out to the little ones scattered around the room.

"He got interested, like I thought he would," she continued. "He wants to control us without working too hard, and he doesn't want to admit he's been doing things wrong. So, after he was done feeling my pain, he offered me preferential treatment."

She'd moved on to the line of wounded at the back wall, snapping pieces off the ration to distribute. The tatty old jacket was missing, probably left in the care of whoever was in charge of the waste rags. Some of the older victims graciously refused the feed she offered, or asked for smaller pieces; the wounded were only about a fourth of the group, despite their captors' best efforts, but the extra food she'd acquired might still not be enough.

"From what he told me there was a psychic in this crew who mentally primed the prisoners," she said, leaning down to hand Karkat his and Twitchy's share. "But he's indisposed, which I think means we killed him in the raid."

She stepped over Karkat's leg; he glanced at her distractedly, only to spot a trail of liquid running down her leg, gleaming cerulean under the weak light. He looked away hastily.

"Which is why he wants me to disrupt the food chain in this room." She moved on to the adjacent wall, seemingly unaware of her own bleeding. "In exchange for this extra food and a hose bath. He said the jacket was on the house."

She waved a piece down at something out of Karkat's sight, and the little yellow grub jumped up seemingly out of nowhere to bite the ribbon's wiggling end. It scurried off hastily, trailing its prize on the filthy floor and over legs and backs as it climbed around willy-nilly; at some point it suddenly rolled on its back and started kicking the ribbon with its five little legs, squirming back and forth and chirping non-stop. The stubby remain of its missing leg quivered in excitement.

Soft-voice contemplated the spectacle in silence for a moment.

"That seems disruptive enough," she said, finally, and went back to her job; there was some laughter, and the usual murmur of conversation restarted. 

Karkat finished feeding Twitchy the last of the ribbon meat and settled back down on the child's chest. There was something oddly soothing about the low steady rumble of voices surrounding him; it didn't exactly make his aches — or his prospects for his future — any better, but the conglomerate of voices made him feel oddly safe despite the circumstances. 

They were fed, they had water, and they'd been predicting and outsmarting their opponents pretty steadily so far. Small victories, but he felt proud of them as he drifted off into sleep.

He was startled back awake when the inside of his eyelids went red once again. 

It confused him for a fraction of a second, but the room's silent stillness sent off a warning notice in his head even before he was fully aware of his location and his state; he opened his eyes, but didn't try to move.

The Ringleader was leaning his shoulder against the entrance, with arms crossed and a shit-eating grin on his face; he waved happily at Soft-Voice, who was back to her usual spot near him, and she nodded back with convincing subtleness. One of his cronies stepped up from behind him, a long coiled hose in hand— no, it was the ribbon meat. 

"Lunch time!" the underling sing-sang, tossing the coil inside and onto a group of kids on the other half of the room. "You get only half this time, because we gave the rest to _her_."

And he pointed to Soft-Voice.

A shudder ran through the room, through Karkat, through Twitchy's limp body; Soft-voice visibly stiffened. How _dare he_ —

He, the Ringleader who smiled wider and thoroughly misinterpreted the source of their anger, as always; he, who grinned even more widely and nastily at Soft-Voice, as if savoring the precarious position he believed her to be now in. 

"Hey man," he said eventually, turning to his lanky asshole friend. "You know, I never did let you guys pick out the evening's entertainment, did I?"

"Hah, not really, no," said the pirate, wiping his hands on his pants as if the ribbon meat had been dirtier than him. "Why, you saying I can chose for tonight?"

"Exactly!" said the Ringleader, magnanimously. "Go on," his arm made a sweeping wide gesture around the room. "We got _plenty_."

"Soo- _weeeet_ ," said the pirate, slowly as if savoring the word. He stared attentively into the contents of the block, his gaze far more intent, far more discerning than the Ringleader's; where the latter chose at random and treated the prisoners mostly as interchangeable, this one clearly had much more refined preferences. He was also much dumber, as he took one step into the room, and then another, in order to squint at the corners adjacent to the entrance and out of immediate view. 

The next few seconds felt to Karkat like an excerpt of a fever daymare.

First, the pirate clapped his hands together in satisfaction. "You'll do!" he said.

Then he stepped past the circle of older teens surrounding the door, the still unharmed group of seven-sweep-olds; then he put one foot past another line of crossed legs and watchful, disgusted faces, and finally leaned over a third circle of sharp horns in order to grasp at something small enough, low enough, close enough to the ground that even while leaning on an elbow and craning his neck up Karkat couldn't spot it past the many heads and shoulders on the way.

The horn on the pirate's hand as he pulled back with his prize was very, very small, as was the head it belonged to.

But as he leaned back someone else followed his movement, so smoothly at first that their skin became confused with the child's. For less than a second the poor kid's silhouette appeared grotesquely disproportionate, and the impression lingered for the remaining milliseconds it took the blur to shove something long and sharp into the pirate's unprotected belly, upwards into his diaphragm and beyond.

It was the girl with the broken prosthetic arm— the outer shell ripped out, the mechanisms stripped off, the metal bones of her forearm twisted off into sharp points. 

They were now buried into the pirate up to her shoulder.

She yanked them back out of the pirate's body as smoothly as she'd pushed them in, her other arm wrapped protectively around his would-be victim; she was sitting back in her place even before he collapsed— sideways, coughing and wheezing, onto a teen who irritatedly pushed him off, first with a hand, then with a burst of psi. The wounded pirate flipped pathetically over heads and horns, spattering teal around the door vanguard; by the time he thudded half on the metal floor and half on someone's lap, the Ringleader and his remaining guard were gaping in shock. 

Then the accomplice behind him rolled her eyes and collapsed.

After staring at the collapsed pirate for more precious seconds, the Ringleader stepped into the room — only for as long and as far as it took to yank his crony's body back and out of the block — and then jumped back, punching the wall outside; the doors closed with a clang and the block was plunged back into total darkness.

And then it started flashing under Twitchy's psychic seizure.

It was worse than the first one, way worse; or so it seemed to Karkat, tired and sick as he was. Again he acted without bothering to think, hugging Twitchy's flailing arms against his torso and laying his head on the child's quivering chest. 

"Shoosh!" he shouted, nearly deafened by the sound of snapping sparks. "Shoosh! Stop! Oh _please_ calm down, just calm down, whatever made you like this—"

Twitchy's body bucked under him, the back of his head clanging against the metal floor once, twice; Karkat tried to pin him down with his weight, enduring the burning needles that showered his cheek and eyelid as best as he could, and risked putting his hand between the child's head and the floor, vague thoughts of head wounds running through his mind. His knuckle crunched painfully under Twitchy's next headbutt.

There were shouts around him, distant and muted. "He's dying! He's dead! Just put him down—"

"Shit, he's gonna fry everyone—"

The grub came scurrying up out of nowhere, chittering anxiously; it ran circles around itself almost comically, heedless of the sparks raining down around its body, and finally clambered up onto Twitchy's spasming shoulder to lick his face, its claws tangling up on Karkat's hair. 

" _Fuck_ ," said Karkat, with feeling.

"Get outta the way, Mutant!" someone shouted from somewhere past the chirping sparks.

"No!" Karkat screamed back. There was a sound like sobbing, or like little hitching gasps, but he couldn't tell where they were coming from. Not from Twitchy, at least; he was making sounds, but they were more like a long warbling moan. Karkat's own teeth were gritted shut. 

Someone tried to pull at his shoulder, but hastily drew their hand back; a gaggle of voices rose around him, shouting feebly against the sound of Twitchy's meltdown and speaking over each other's voices.

"Let go, let go!" 

"Step back, mutant—"

"I'm not getting any closer to that!"

"Maybe if we smack his head really hard—"

"We're _not_ doing this— we're _not_ going to cull among ourselves—"

"You guys waiting for a miracle or summat?"

" _Shut the fuck up, all of you!_ " Karkat screamed, his face buried into the small bony chest. Twitchy froze, his back arched from the floor; there was a sudden flare right by his head, a thunderclap up above, the sound of shattering coming from all sides; acid droplets rained on his back, sizzling hot and invigorating in their pain. Karkat's body seized with wayward energy.

He needed that. 

Wrestling ruthless control of his muscles, he redirected aimless twitching into purposeful movement, and jumped to his knees with Twitchy in his arms. He guided the shaking head to his shoulder, settled the filthy rump onto his lap. The grub tumbled down to the floor, curled into a ball.

The effect was immediate: the sparks visibly diminished in intensity, and so did Twitchy's full-body seizing. His arms shook under Karkat's embrace, his calf muscles seemed to pulse arrhythmically, and his trembling breath was filled with small sounds of pain, but he was calming.

Karkat clutched the small body, his hand clinging to the child's back, his breath harsh in his throat.

"You will _not_ be put down like a beast," he growled into Twitchy's neck. 

Twitchy was clearly not capable of parsing words at the moment. But maybe some meaning came through, or the tone itself spoke enough; the child's shaking diminished into shivering, and then he sagged onto Karkat's shoulder like a puppet with loose strings.

Karkat sighed, letting go of the rattling growl in his chest, and rested a hand on the back of Twitchy's head. He struggled to focus back on his surroundings; the sickly orange glow of the defective light seemed even fainter, and the floor gleamed here and there in the darkness, sometimes wet, sometimes sharp. Everyone was staring at him, tense and vigilant, and the only movement he caught was someone lowering something visibly pointy to the floor. The silence rang with phantom sounds in his ears, and the clicking of the grub's legs as it scurried back away.

A lukewarm trail ran down his shoulder. 

"He puked..." murmured Soft Voice, staring wide-eyed— at him, not at Twitchy or Twitchy's spew. 

"Huh," Karkat grunted, shrugging with his free shoulder. "Doesn't feel like a lot."

"It's not," she whispered. 

Her eyes wandered searchingly towards Twitchy's face. It was the first time Karkat saw her look anything less than perfectly poised, and it made her seem upsettingly _young_. She was younger than him, of course, but it was the first time he really felt the difference it made, and it filled him with inexplicable fondness.

He braced Twitchy's back with a hand, and set the other on her head. Just... let it lay there for a moment. Her hair was thin and short, grimy, though the latter he would bet wasn't how it was usually kept. They were both slouched under the weight of nights of too little food and too much cold, but he hadn't had to raise his hand much higher than his shoulder. 

"You gonna fit the two of them on your lap?" someone asked, and Karkat let go of her head in order to solemnly raise his middle finger.

A rag was tossed his way, and it flew over his head before he even registered movement. Behind him, Irritable Girl took charge of the problem, wiping down the spew — little more than a trickle, barely worth worrying about in their already filthy situation — and tossing the cloth back the way it came. In jerks and spurts, breath started to return to the collective that comprised their prison.

The grub clambered up Twitchy's legs, sniffing intently at his face and torso before leaving with a parting lick. The forgotten ribbon feed was recovered and measured by someone's elbow-length, a step Karkat was not aware was usually taken; apparently it was barely a hand less than the usual, which proved their captors were as always full of shit. 

An effort was initiated to gather the shards from the floor, aided by the light of a psychic current that Raspy grudgingly ran between raised arms. Even then, it was impossible to tell how many lamps had burst, or how much water they had lost. Karkat winced at the thought, then winced again; his previous movement had jostled his wounded foot, swollen taut and complaining under the strain of his bent knee. 

He didn't try to lie back down. Better to leave such an attempt to the vague future. He'd probably have to lie back with Twitchy facing down, too, as the position seemed to improve whatever headstorms he was suffering from.

Soft Voice scooted a little closer, then made a face, and brushed some small shards from under her rump. 

She leaned in close— closer to Twitchy's ear than Karkat's, but close enough for him to hear. "He's not there," she said, very, very quietly.

Karkat just looked at her, unsure of how to react. 

"I can feel people's feelings," she continued, "but all he feels is pain, and confusion—"

"Then he's there," Karkat whispered back. "If he can be confused... look," he tried to catch her downcast eyes, "I know what you're thinking. I've thought it, I've been thinking it nonstop. It would be kinder. But I can't do it, I'm not—" his voice caught in his throat, and the words he pushed past felt like needles scratching his nutrition pipe, "—I'm not strong enough to watch someone else do it either, not right now, not even as a favor. I can, I can fool myself into being strong but—"

"Nobody'll cull him," said a cold voice over their heads. Karkat and Soft Voice looked up at Water Girl, and the harsh, professional set of her face limned by Raspy's weak light. "It would set a dangerous precedent. We can't afford to cull each other. His time will have to come naturally."

She handed a piece of ribbon feed to Soft Voice, and another to Karkat. Only one piece, and only enough for one person. The message was clear enough; she stepped away without looking back. 

Karkat sighed, but mostly it was in relief at dropping the conversation. He shifted his weight as well as he could without jostling his foot, and maneuvered Twitchy's little body around until he was comfortably nestled against the crook of his elbow and not likely to slip off his lap.

Whether Twitchy really was trying to bury his face into Karkat's neck, or whether his head had just lolled that way, Karkat didn't care. He cared much more for the way the child's chin moved when fed the first dollop of chewed meal, a weak but very clear and deliberate attempt at chewing. 

It meant nothing, of course. Mere reflex, and it certainly didn't mean Twitchy could chew his own food any better than he could before. But at this point Karkat wasn't acting out of hope or despair— only the resolution to finish what he started, and live or die by his own decisions, and also because the poor kid literally could not chew by himself, god. Was he a fool? Of course! But he was also a fool with a weak and mushy heart, and he hated the thought of letting something happen that he had a chance, however remote, to stop.

Troll heroes screamed defiance in the face of death by shaking their weapons at the sky and taking all in sight, friend or foe or beast, as their entourage to hell. He did it by delicately tipping his only source of nutrition into the lips of a brain-dead child. In the circumstances, he found it to be just as good a way to go. 

It mattered, how he chose to live his last; it mattered, how he chose to die. And he wouldn't die as someone who'd abandon a responsibility he'd willingly taken, and it was that simple.

Soft Voice ate her share in silence, the feel of her stare boring into the back of his neck. If anyone else was looking, if anyone else had heard their conversation, and if anybody else knew what he was doing, no one said a peep; they just stuck to whichever topics they'd been mumbling about, and which Karkat hadn't bothered to keep track of.

"...how they're gonna take all this noise either," someone was saying. 

"They'll assume it was a fight," said another voice. "And that's probably for the best. It'll feed their assumptions, at least."

"What about the dead pirate, though, what if they retaliate—"

"I hope nobody's expecting me to apologize!" called the girl with the prosthetic remains, all the way from her spot on the other side of the room. She was grinning, her face and shoulder smeared with half-wiped teal; from the small horns that were visibly tucked under her chin, she probably had her own small charge perched on her lap.

Her eyes crossed Karkat's, only for an instant— but whether anything was said in response to her flippant comment, he was too distracted by the moment of kinship to take notice.

She did turn and show her tongue to someone, however. There was some snickering.

"Let's not laugh about this," came Indigo's deep voice. Karkat blinked at him, a little offput. The tone of his voice was strange, a little hollow.

But the big guy took a deep breath, and when he spoke next his voice seemed normal.

"Strictly speaking you did the right thing," he conceded. "Even the ringleader wouldn't step among us, and that's a boundary we depend on. You maintained it. Even that fool should recognize that. But he'll definitely retaliate in some way."

He sighed, rubbed his eyes with two fingers. "He'll have to, because he's trying to impose his authority on us. He'll come up with something stupid, I'm sure of it. And stupidity can come up with nasty surprises. I confess I don't know what we should do."

"Well, I say we maintain our line," said Stumpy, looking around himself for support. "Either they respect our territory, or they're dead. It's their fault for sticking us all together! Our block, our law!"

A chorus of agreement rose around him.

"Could you be a little more discreet about your revolution?" asked Water Girl, acidly, on her way back to her sitting spot. "We _have_ been trying not to get crushed all at once."

"What, you saying we should let them walk over us? Even more than they already _are_?"

"No, I'm telling you not to make a party about it," she said. "Do it like Arm did, quick and professional. There's a difference between making a point to a superior and thumbing your nose at them, and it's the difference between life and death." She pointedly dropped on her ass, legs crossed, glaring at him.

"I'd love to dance on their corpses," croaked Raspy. "But if I get a chance to clean this ship later then I'm willing to hold up on it now."

"Dude, I thought you'd be with me on this!" Stumpy turned to Raspy with a look of pure betrayal.

"It's not like she forbade us from killing," said another of the door vanguard, an androgynous teen still half-spattered with the dead pirate's blood. Possibly the one who'd flipped the body towards the door. "She's just telling us not to gloat. I think it's a wise suggestion."

"Look!" Stumpy waved his stump angrily. "Yeah, we're all in a super delicate position, no clothes, no weapons, blah blah, whatever, but if we rattle them enough— the Big Dude agrees, that's been his plan all along, right? We rattle these bastards, keep them guessing at us, and then when we have somewhere to run to— but we gotta keep rattling these fuckers. Right?" He turned to Indigo. "Right?"

Rather than answering, Indigo sighed, slow and deep and heartfelt. He lowered his head to his knees with a groan, then straightened with a jump; the grub was squirming onto his lap and making little distressed churrs, only to curl up and settle with a satisfied snort when he shifted his legs to give it space. 

Karkat suddenly wondered about the little thing. Why was it just running around unsupervised? Was Grubsitter even still alive? A glance at Seadweller's corner showed the jade-blood conked out, his head dropped back and mouth wide open, completely oblivious to the drama currently taking place. Hopefully he wasn't dying from whatever was turning Seadweller's voice into Raspy's.

The grub's timely intervention seemed to center Indigo. He put a hand on its small head, took a deep breath, leaned his head back to look at the ceiling, and then back down.

"Okay," he said, nodding to himself, and then louder to the rest of the room: "Is anybody here precognitive?"

The not-so-blank-eyed girl behind Karkat raised a hand, but shook it in a so-so sign while making a dubious face. One of the smaller kids raised a hand as well, and, to general surprise, so did Raspy.

"Is there anything you _can't_ do," mumbled Karkat to himself, rearranging Twitchy's limbs on his lap.

"I don't _like_ to do it," he hissed back. 

Indigo gravely ignored their pissy convo. "Can any of you tell us our short-term prospects?"

Blank's eyes unfocused— though unlike her empty, faraway look from before, her face remained fully attentive and awake; it was as if she was trying to bore through the middle-distance. Karkat couldn't see much of the the small kid other than his hunched shoulders, but Raspy's eyes had narrowed into two glowy lines, and sparks seemed to climb between his horns every now and then.

"This is hard," said Blank eventually. "There are way too many elements involved, frankly way more than even a smuggling ring seems to justify. The Ringleader is exactly what he seems, but there's a huge tangle of intentions surrounding our capture. I see a positive shift in the near future, though." She blinked back into focus, then pinched the bridge of her nose with a grimace. "That was spectacularly useless," she mumbled. The girl by her side patted her shoulder in sympathy.

"An outside-context factor is approaching," said Raspy, his harsh whisper somehow even creepier than usual. Sparks climbed his horns, and he winced in tandem. "There'll be explosions. Lots of debris. A spirograph." A nasty grin spread in his face. "So many explosions. Blood is going to flow. I knew it."

"Good," said Indigo. Then he hesitated, closed his mouth, opened it again; finally he settled back against the wall. "I don't know about the outside context," he said. "But I've got an idea for the next time the asshole shows up. It'll depend on _his_ next step, though, so..." he hesitated again. "It might be best if I sit on it for the time being."

Some outraged muttering arose; his moirail shot him a dirty look which he very studiously ignored. Karkat just shrugged to himself; after the previous excitement, he'd plain run out of energy to care.

He was trying to discern whether it was possible to sleep sitting up when a small excited voice rose.

"I saw, I saw!" said the child, the third precognitive. "I saw! Almost _everyone_ is going to make it!"

The sounds of discontentment and spots of conversation died down straight away. Was that good? Was it bad? Where were they making it _to_? 

Karkat refused to look up or react. He just shifted Twitchy's weight on his lap minimally, fussed over the arrangement of his limbs and studiously ignored the fact that he knew exactly who _wouldn't_ be making it.

* * *

Apparently the Ringleader's reaction to Arm's little stunt was to let them languish in the tragic absence of his visits. Time passed with no sign of food or water, though Karkat slept so often he had no idea how long they normally took; this time, though, he found himself unable to sleep— he felt cold and hot and short of breath and dared not lay Twitchy down, so he sat dizzy and uncomfortable with the child on his lap. His broken foot pounded like a hammer, his skin felt tight on his face, and his skewed sense of time insisted the pirates had skipped a whole week of rations, which felt ludicrous. 

None of the older kids seemed troubled by the wait, at least, and Karkat's previous worries about the state of their water cache proved unfounded; still, it was running awfully low by the time the usual heavy footsteps broke through the general murmur of the block. Soft Voice was asleep, but the tension in the air was such that the whole place dropped into silence without her prompt.

The door slid open with a rain of sparks and an unholy screech, and of the few light panels that turned on, most of them flickered like the illumination rig of a disco temple. On the other side of the light show, Ringleader stood with legs open wide, a sneering grin on his face, a mace carelessly propped against a shoulder, and three armed cronies at his back. It looked very much like the overly dramatic entrance of a disco priest.

Considering that the Church of Disco was a heretic and forbidden branch of the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs and known only from movies even Karkat regarded with derision, he felt that being part of it would have explained a lot about this pirate's particular brand of stupidity. But the effect was probably unintended; after all, he wore no stardust-laden facepaint and lacked the hair for the sect's characteristic coiffure.

"I expect you've had enough time to think about what you've done," he said, displicently tapping his mace against his shoulder. "So I shouldn't have to tell you the consequences for _funny business_ , should I?"

Nobody spoke. What would anyone even say in response to something so lame.

"But to commemorate our brand-new _understanding_ ," he continued, smugger than ever, "i've got some _special entertainment_ planned for tonight!"

"Really? How wonderful," said another adult voice, and Karkat blinked uncomprehending as Indigo rose to his feet, casually stepping over the heads of surprised children and teens on his way to the door. Behind him, his moirail's face was a mixture of anger and anxiety. "I've been incredibly bored lately. Mind if I join you?"

It might have been Karkat's imagination, coupled with the distance and the uncertain lighting, but it seemed to him that a couple of lonely sparks from the door flew into the Ringleader's gaping mouth. They might have been related to the way he shook himself from head to toe before focusing a leer on Indigo's face.

"Are you offering to _entertain_ us?" he asked, voice gleeful.

"I'm thinking rather of us _entertaining_ each other," said Indigo, wearing a small and very threatening smirk. 

Indigo was a whole head taller than the tallest pirate in the group, and positively loomed over the Ringleader; the asshole was in the uncomfortable position of having to leer nearly directly upwards. On the other hand he appeared to be doing it with great gusto. 

One of the defective lights flickered on for a little longer, and Karkat's eyes caught a long, bluish bruise on Indigo's torso, snaking under his arm. Suddenly he remembered that the wounded were kept close to the walls for a reason, and that Indigo had been leaning against one from the beginning—

If there was anything more to their conversation, Karkat missed it; the doors were screeching closed by the time he snapped back out of his thoughts, and the footsteps soon faded away. 

The lights didn't turn off all at once this time. Instead, they flickered their way into dimness one by one, blinking off-tempo. One of them burst in a sudden flash. Above his head, Karkat noticed a great dark burn stain for the first time, possibly courtesy of Twitchy. 

Everyone was talking at the same time, but he wasn't paying attention. From the time Indigo got to his feet to the moment the doors closed, his mind had had enough time to figure out what he was thinking. 

It was the kind of thing he'd have come up with. He just couldn't tell if that made him very smart or if it made Indigo very dumb. 

Soft Voice poked his shoulder, looking bleary and confused as anything, then raised her shoulders in an inquisitive shrug. She'd probably have had to shout to be heard, and he wasn't entirely sure she was capable of it. The implicit question was clear enough, though.

"Indigo offered to go with them," he explained. Her eyes widened, then narrowed in thought. In between those reactions she'd snapped completely awake.

Somewhere else in the room, he could hear Water Girl trying and failing to call for silence. A glance showed that Raspy had elected to just glower at anyone who turned to him. Stumpy and his group were tangling horns in a huddle, and he occasionally wagged the remains of his elbow in some sharp gesture. Prosthetic Arm cracked a huge yawn as he looked. Indigo's moirail was curled into a ball of misery.

Welp. Karkat cleared his throat, took a somewhat labored breath and shouted.

" _Shut the fuck up already!_ "

Success was not immediate. His voice came out raw and rough, and his throat felt full of gravel. But the hesitant lull that rose around him was enough to allow a distant clang to ring through.

_That_ clang was all that was needed for silence to drown the block.

Breaths were held. Hands touched the floor, ears were pushed against the wall. The sounds of fighting were unmistakable; Ringleader had outlived his uselessness, and his stupidity had grown too unpredictable, so Indigo had taken the matter into his hands. 

The noise grew distant, faded, came back minutes later. Indigo's moirail glared into the middle distance, attentive as if she could tell which bangs were caused by her palemate through sound alone. 

And as suddenly as it started, it all stopped. One last clang, and then silence.

Karkat swayed gently in place, prodding gingerly at his thoughts. His head felt stuffed full of fuzz and his ears rang, though that might also be an artifact of the silence. He didn't worry overmuch about it. He didn't expect to make it any more than he did Twitchy, after all. Whatever the reactions of those around him were, of Indigo's moirail, of Water Girl, of Seadweller or anyone else, he made it a point to not check. It was none of his business, or not for long anyway, right? So he looked at Twitchy's foot instead, small and scrawny. Man, so scrawny.

When the door screeched once again open and Indigo stumbled back in, he congratulated himself on not pointlessly wasting grief.

Not that grief wasn't out of the menu yet. Indigo limped two steps into the room, and would have collapsed if it weren't for a couple of the doorway teens and their timely aid. He looked awful; his bruises had multiplied, and his mouth and chin were a glistening smear of highblood blue that coated his neck and part of his chest. Karkat spotted a few cuts and something that looked a lot like a boiled patch of skin. 

As he was led away from the entrance, a group of pirates became visible behind him. 

Karkat's first impression was that they were very serious and very armed. The second was that the one in the middle was holding some sort of melon caked in gross cerulean gunk.

A glance at this face made it obvious that this was the ship's _actual_ captain. 

His olive eyes surveyed the room carefully. There was nothing predatory or expectant about that look; it was the look of a troll mentally taking stock of things that they already knew to be theirs. He dispassionately lingered at the sight of Indigo being gingerly sat by his horrified moirail before moving on, and then stopping, at the sight of Karkat.

Karkat's throat clenched in panic. Instinct made him clutch Twitchy a little closer. The pirate was smirking. It was small, but it was totally a smirk, an unreadable little twitch of his lips—

The troll tossed his filthy burden into the room, and turned around on his heels. It bounced off the floor and revealed itself as a head, part of the dorsal support column still attached to its ragged neck. The horns were familiar, but the face was but a collection of vague cerulean bumps. 

He didn't get to see much more before he was slapped by a curtain of water. 

This wasn't like the previous baths. He sputtered and coughed under the blinding onslaught, but had enough time to recover his wits and cup his hand for several drinks before the jet moved on to the other side of the room. Twitchy squirmed in discomfort on his lap, and Karkat cursed himself for having forgotten about the child— how likely was Water Girl to liberate a drop of water for him, when she made it clear he wasn't supposed to be fed?— but after half a minute the jet slowly made its way back, and Karkat wasn't caught by surprise this time. 

When it was finally over Karkat felt chilled to his very soul, but almost not-filthy.

The water-bearing pirate stepped back without giving them so much as a cursory glance, and in her place another one tossed a coil of feed into the room. And that was it— the doors lumbered close with another awful screech, and they were once again left to their own designs in the drenched room.

The lights blinked in stroboscopic flashes, water trickled audibly into the grates lining the floor, and someone screeched.

"Oh my fucking _god_ , this is the Ringleader's head!"

"Yes," said a choked, pained voice that Karkat was surprised to find was Indigo's. He was hunched in on himself, breathing in shallow gasps, and his moirail touched his shoulder gingerly with her forehead in a gesture of utter defeat. His blood stains were only sort-of washed away, and fresh blood trickled down from the gaping hole where his front teeth used to be. 

But he still smirked, a smirk not unlike the pirate captain's very own.

"He was bringing our prices down," he mumbled, and then laughed shakily. "Wasn't supposed to... to sample the _goods_..."

He swallowed, the movement visibly painful on him, and sagged back against the wall. The grub was once again curled up on his lap, churring softly; the sound was nostalgic and weirdly comforting, somewhat like the sleepy murmur of their collective voices. 

"Well," Poop Dude broke the comfortable silence, "I don't know about anyone else but I don't really want that head in the area. The place is unhygienic enough without asshole germs around."

"Hey, pssst," Grate Keeper called from the other side of the room. "Just toss it this way!" He winked, cocking his head invitingly towards his corner. "Right here, I know just how to handle that thing."

One of the psionics floated the grisly head above everyone's heads, making it rotate and bob around and dive dangerously over squealing children on its way to Grate Keeper; once it arrived at its destination, the teen pulled his grate open with a flourish and shoved the head unceremoniously down the tight-fitting entrance, so it would sit among their collected biological waste.

* * *

Ringleader's unmourned departure brought about big, obvious changes, but very few of them. Food and water now came at frankly inconvenient short intervals, and more than once Karkat found himself rudely yanked out of a half-nap by a cold jet. At the same time, though the extra food was welcome at first, the nasty ribbon feed wasn't any more appetizing when offered in plenty. Under Water-Girl's suggestion they tried stashing the leftovers in a corner behind someone's back, but on the very next shower they had a disgusting surprise— the feed swelled to nearly four times its size when drenched, and turned into, as Karkat had long known, a nasty pasty glue. Subsequent coils were kept close to the ceiling above Seadweller's head, floating in place under a psychic's care and hopefully out of view.

The pirates who brought them these supplies did not stop to gawk, leer, perv, or gloat. The Captain himself, after coming and grinning at Karkat like the figurative riddlebeast expecting to prey on a witless pilgrim, did not see it fit to make a single visit. Their new routine was now to be repeatedly drenched and fed gross glue food; their new favorite pastime became sneezing.

Karkat couldn't even tell if a single night had already gone by. Worse, the complete lack of sign from whatever nasty plans the Captain had for him was driving him nuts. Whatever it was, the asshole should just get it over with already and save him the anxiety.

Not that he was likely to. He was probably another sadist, just a psychological one.

Morale was low in the block, and Indigo's condition did not help matters; his moirail fussed over him and the grub never left his lap, but he was wilting fast. Even though his gums had stopped bleeding, he still spewed blood from his mouth in great, painful-looking hiccups. Sometimes it seemed to Karkat that he wasn't even breathing anymore.

It was during a long stretch of this depressing silence that the floor vibrated under them. 

Not the vibration that prefaced the arrival of heavy boots, or the one that followed a faraway impact; it was more like a light trembling, an electrified shudder. It snapped Karkat right out of a misty delirium, and he raised his head, expectant. The entire block held its breath. 

The silence stretched interminably, interspersed only by the small machine sounds that had accompanied them from the start— the thrum of air recyclers, the sparking of a defective lamp, the distant groan of machinery.

"Someone's really nervous," whispered Soft Voice, as if unwilling to crack the tension even with her own usual tone. "I can feel it from here."

More breathless silence.

"It's a group," she added. "They all going to the same place. They're all anxious."

"They're probably going to negotiate," muttered Water Girl. "Stay sharp, everyone. Let's see if they only grab one of us or if they'll lead us out in a group. And let's not start the fight in this block, or we'll be boxed in."

There were scattered nods in acknowledgement. Twitchy's uncertain hand poked Karkat in the chest, and he hugged the child a little tighter. There was a different kind of vibration in the air, like a new sound his ears couldn't pick and his horns could barely catch. Fancifully he wondered if those were the drums of war for their last ride into oblivion.

This was it. He would try to run but probably fail, and leaving Twitchy behind was out of question. If they took him, and it was certain that they would, then they would break him until he stopped being himself; this was his last chance to show the uncaring universe that he once was. Even if nobody saw. Even if nobody cared.

And then, starting from the wall, shoulders rose and backs stiffened in a cascade; he felt a brisk tap in his mind, there and gone before he could start bracing for the impending violation, and his own body stiffened in belated surprise.

A second went by, and there was a muffled explosion. Twitchy jerked violently in tandem, and Karkat tightened his grasp. 

"I think the negotiations just soured," someone whispered. Karkat wanted to scream.

This was no good, this was really no good. If the pirates were themselves attacked, it would be too much to hope that the attackers were equally under-equipped. And if the attackers chose to blow their ship up, then they wouldn't even get to die on their own terms!

The ship shuddered again — an actual, full-body shudder that had their teeth rattling and asses bouncing and subjected his foot to searing amounts of pain — and there was an awful, awful, too-close crack of tortured carapace, peppered with the groaning and screeching of twisting metal. It was their defective doors made a thousand times worse.

It'll be quick, Karkat told himself. At least this way, it'll be quick. But then there came the sounds of shooting and screaming and clanging, and he thought to himself, oh shit, it won't.

The noise was over way too soon for his peace of mind.

"Someone's approaching!" hissed Soft Voice. "It's strange. They're strange! Very serious and angry—" she gasped. "They noticed me!"

She froze, staring wide-eyed at her own knees. Karkat tried in vain to steady his breath. 

The approaching footsteps were audible by now. They had a different quality from Ringleader's heavy tread, or from the later pirates' uncaring gait. They were purposeful and steady, but did not reverberate with the same intensity. Softer shoes, Karkat guessed.

The footsteps stopped before their block, and Karkat braced for the screeching of their defective doors. But they never opened.

Instead, there was a momentary silence, and the doors and part of the surrounding wall just... detached. Clean off. Dropped back a little, then slid smoothly to the side. 

The four behind it were uniformed, that much was obvious. The color and cut of the uniforms were like nothing he'd ever seen or heard about, however: predominant whites, with blacks and grays and details in bright color. They might have been caste markers if it weren't for the fact that, of the four, two did not appear to be trolls at all.

Of the two trolls, the one in front and center had the stumps of sawed horns and freakishly white hair. On the left side of his torso a black badge displayed a troll symbol in teal, clashing with the scarlet stripe above it. He took one step forward and stood right on the line the door used to occupy; he squared his shoulders and raised his chin, wearing authority like it was made for his shoulders, and spoke.

"I am Lieutenant Commander Cadrat Vareni of the Galactic Militia Vessel _Singularity_. Under Administrative Resolution Thirty Two of the Galactic Standard Year Eighteen Thousand and Eight Four, I am authorized to speak in behalf of Commander Auriga Keelus, Captain of the _Singularity_. I am informing you, on an official capacity, that you are now under the protection of the _Singularity_ , its acting crew, the Galactic Militia as a whole, and all Administrative, Executive and Judiciary powers in the territories encompassing the Coalition of the Free Systems."

Silence. Karkat barely caught half of what he'd just said, but from what he could gather, this guy was claiming to be... some sort of law enforcement? 

"Are you a legislacerator?" asked Water Girl, staring intently into the troll's face.

"An equivalent position," he answered, and his lips quirked up in a smile. It made his façade of military severity crack straight through the middle; he became unexpectedly charming and approachable, almost suspiciously so. "In people talk, what I just said is: we arrested the pirates, and are now charged by law with escorting you to safety."

Bullshit, thought Karkat. Define safety. There's no such thing for me even if you see it fit to preserve everyone else's existence. Most of us are sick enough to contaminate an entire ship. Two are unresponsive and straight up dying. One is a mutant who can't run. Watcha gonna do? Nothing was ever said about what happens to living cargo when legislacerators catch up to smugglers, not on movies, not on series.

The legislacerator equivalent just stood there at the edge of their territory, arms crossed at his back in some sort of cheerful parade stand, glancing around at the room as if he could see variations on Karkat's own thoughts percolating over everyone's heads. His face was a very careful, cultivated sort of blank. He seemed willing to stand there and wait indefinitely.

"Well..." One of the uniformed figures — a hairless, hornless, vaguely female-shaped alien servant with lusus-like skin — stepped up from behind the legislacerator, holding some sort of silvery tablet in its hand. It had a close-mouthed, non-threatening smile in its otherwise freakishly _weird_ face. "How many of you can stand?"

Oh. Of course.

Slowly, painfully, and with much effort, they shuffled to their unsteady feet. Nights of sitting back to back in the cramped block had made their bodies stiff and heavy, and the nudity and showers had chilled their flesh down to the bone. Karkat wrestled with his swollen foot, every movement causing him a stab of pain even as he refused to let go of Twitchy to use his hands— but other hands came to the rescue, discretely holding him up as he navigated their combined weight up his one working leg and gingerly set the broken foot down.

It hurt like a motherfucker, but if he kept most of the weight off it, he could fake. (Twitchy was upsettingly light in his arms.)

He stared straight at the legislacerator, daring him to notice Twitchy's stiff bony body half-draped over his shoulder, to question, to cull them both while he stood proud on his own two feet with his self-imposed duty in his arms. He was surrounded by silence, and ahead of him there were dozens of backs whose owners were glaring out their own silent challenges.

The alien's smile became strained; it clutched its tablet close to its chest, its dark alien eyes coating over with extra glossiness. What that kind of physical reaction meant in alien-slave-ese, Karkat did not know or care.

The legislacerator paid her no notice. His sight never strayed from them, and when he straightened his shoulders and made a strange salute, there was no trace of humor in his eyes.


	3. Cognitive Dissonance

For the first time, Karkat stepped out into the corridor on his own two feet. 

Or more specifically, he limped. Very slowly, very painfully, in very short steps — but they were his own feet, and no one was holding him up or dragging him along. Some hands hovered nearby, ready to pick up the slack if he took a spill, but they respected his pride; after all, they too were clinging to their own at the moment, as hard as if it were their own Twitchy.

Not one of them tried to run. Whether they were guarded or not Karkat couldn't tell from the middle of the slow-shifting crowd, but either way everyone was stiff and achy and shuffling their feet. That wasn't to say they weren't biding their time, certainly; eventually there would be a sign from somewhere, and he and Twitchy would stay behind like a pair of chumps while everyone else bolted. The perfect bait. 

A troll and one of the aliens squeezed into the room as the last stragglers filed out. Karkat didn't much care what they were up to, concentrated as he was on not screaming when he put weight on his foot.

"Looks like Indigo and Wolfsister stayed inside," someone whispered at his back.

"Shit," escaped from Karkat's mouth in a hiss. "Shit, shit. Shit. Shit. _Shit!_ "

A dam broke inside him, and hot, helpless rage spilled out. He couldn't stop cursing under his breath, and couldn't tell if he was cursing over the culling or over his foot. In a fit of spite, he took a long stride and pushed the broken foot down hard; the flash of pain made his sight go white, but the gargle that rose up his throat was more growl than groan, and the tears lining his face had been there already.

He kept the elongated pace, taking perverse pleasure in triggering the pain, claiming the wound as his new reality. And maybe he really was limping that much faster, because in but a few seconds he almost ran into someone's back, and found there was a cluster of kids just sort of standing and blocking the way.

He wanted to scream at the holdover. Maybe he even did. But it was already in the process of thinning out, and as the number of backs blocking his sight diminished he was able to see the cause of the blockage for himself.

There was a giant hole in the wall. This was a significant fact, as they happened to be in space. More significantly, a peek inside informed him that the hole in question seemed to have punched through several layers of blocks, corridors, walls, and circuitentaclery. 

The thing that had presumably caused this destruction was was a transparent tube with silvery-gray fittings and soft white lights; the holdover was generated and perpetuated by each kid freezing in stupidification at the sight, much like he currently was, and then was thinned as the gawkers were instructed to stand at the entrance of the strange fixture. 

Karkat joined a small group, silent and numb from pain and grief, and barely registered as the floor started moving under him. His only thought was "revolving factocullery belt from the movies". 

The change of scenery as the belt moved out of the ship made a much stronger impression. 

Everything was... luminous. Not bright or painful in the eyes, despite their long stay in the darkened block, but the light shining from the high (very high) ceiling diffused off a myriad silver-white and charcoal-gray textures, clean and soft. Underneath the factocullery belt, the floor dropped into gleaming dark and light grays far below. He could see a lot of intricate machinery — great mechanical elbows, clear tubes, clamps, mounted pistols, all soft-gloss and diffuse shimmer — made or coated in materials he didn't recognize. His best guess was that they were being led through some sort of space hangar bay.

Behind him, the old pirate ship stretched far to the sides, looking even dirtier and grimier in juxtaposition to its surroundings. It was clamped firmly in place by the great elbows, and a little ways away another transparent factocullery belt tube rolled a different sort of cargo toward the approaching balcony. 

At the front, a troll with two-pronged horns stood stiff and tense, his arms crossed at his back. The distance made features hard to discern, but he seemed to be wearing amber-lensed glasses curving around his face. He was followed by a line of tall, oblong capsules, white with smoky viewing panels; most of them were angled away, but a couple were not.

One of them rolled under a light fixture at just the right angle to make the unmoving troll inside visible. 

The encapsulated trolls were escorted by a motley group of trolls and aliens, all looking incredibly grim. Some of the aliens had hairless glossy skin, white and black; some had funny hair colors, and skin too light or too dark for trolls. Some were bald and dappled in lowblood colors, and two long strands dangled from the top of their ridged scalps. None of them had visible horns.

One of the dappled aliens approached Karkat while distributing small vials. Karkat raised an emphatic eyebrow, chin buried into Twitchy's arm; rather than pushing the kid off his arms or cracking one across his face for the cheek, the alien just chuckled ruefully and tipped one of the vials over his lips, all nice and solicitous. Maybe alien servants weren't allowed to dole out punishment? The movies never told much about them, if at all, and they were generally shown to be developmentally retarded in some way. Then again, for all he knew the thing was poison...

Whatever it was, it was warm and thick and coated the inside of his mouth, spread over his teeth, tingled at his gums. It had no taste, but it felt good on his tongue. He held very still as the alien tipped another vial into Twitchy's mouth, and the kid smacked his lips together a few times when he was done. Nice poison.

The factocullery belt was nearly at its destination. Again, those who were off the belt were left to mill about uncertainly, sitting on benches, standing in suspicion. Karkat wondered if the belt was going to stop so he could limp off of it, and what was going to happen to the group right behind him if it did.

What actually happened was that he was standing one second, and sitting the other. 

He awkwardly adjusted his grip on Twitchy as the seat he was inexplicably on sped out of the belt. His foot pounded in compass with his speeding pulse; he looked around, dizzily, but received only blank looks from his fellow prisoners. 

The dappled alien servant stepped out from behind him. Was it him? Did he push a chair at the back of his knees, or something equally wigglerish? Asshole! He clutched Twitchy a little harder. Assholes, all of them!

Around him a small group of adults and aliens was enacting some sort of bizarre ritual, involving taking a rectangular box, pushing one of the little kids' thumb on it, and then poking and prodding at the kid with the little whatevers inside. Were they being filed away in some sort of slave database? Marked? No one seemed hurt, just confused.

Eventually a brownblood-skinned, female-looking hornless alien knelt by his seat with two of the boxes.

"I'm going to perform a very quick preliminary exam," she said in smooth, unaccented Alternian. "After that, you'll be in line for an ablution. We only have three medical ablution traps, unfortunately, so you'll be bathing in pairs." 

She pressed Twitchy's thumb to a glassy panel on the box's lid, and it opened with a small click. The insides weren't any more recognizable from up close.

The first mystifying medicullerist ritual she enacted was to stick several pieces of fancy-frosty-textured adhesive all over Twitchy. On a shoulder, inside his elbow, in his palm, under his nose like a dumb mustache, behind an ear. On his chest, over the foodsack, on a bony knee, behind the knee, between toes. Twitchy blinked owlishly at her moving fingers, and occasionally tugged a limb away from the touch in a tentative, boundary-gauging sort of way; the alien took the rebellion in stride, letting him get the movement out of his system before resuming her bizarre work. Karkat was too busy scrutinizing her actions to be elated by this display of consciousness.

Then, she scraped Twitchy's tongue with a flat spoon, which was safely deposited in a small narrow compartment, and touched his forehead with a beetle-drive-sized rectangle. That at least Karkat thought safe to assume was a temperature gauger; it had a display with some weird characters he could only assume were numbers. (Why the different characters?)

As she pressed the temperature gauger to Twitchy's wrist ( _?_ not a temperature gauger then), the alien servant started speaking again, as steady and sure as a professional news announslayer. 

"These are just surface measures," she said. "Body temperature, blood pressure, and skin contamination level. Don't worry about the latter; it's just so we'll know what pathogens you'll need immunization against. After your ablution, you'll undergo immunization and a full diagnostic examination, and then we won't be poking at you again."

She started tugging the adhesives off Twitchy's skin. They snapped stiff as soon as she cleared them off, and she pushed them into the box's narrow compartments with quick, practiced movements. The beetle-gauger went inside as well, and then she closed the box. 

He offered his thumb as soon as she raised another. It was too late to fight back anyway.

The examination really was more inconvenient than anything. The adhesive barely itched when pasted on, and barely pulled when tugged off; scraping his tongue didn't feel any worse than brushing it; the beetle-gauger was barely cold against his skin. He would have suspected the bizarre drill to be purposefully confusing, a pointless disorientation exercise designed to make them more pliant and uneasy, but taking skin surface samples with adhesives made too much sense in its simplicity. Not to mention the fact that she had explained it at all in the first place.

Someone approached with a blanket when she was done, which she wrapped around the two of them, tucked behind his shoulders, and tugged over his knees. This of all gestures drove his brain to inexplicable fizzling— he wanted to jump, but was frozen; he wanted to scream, but his throat locked; he wanted to toss the restraining weight off him and run away, but it was _warm_. What was the meaning of this? Why this grand display of niceness?

Three seconds later, he started feeling like a complete idiot for freaking out. It was just some fabric, for fuck's sake, even if it was ugly as sin and had some really awful looking, overly colorful print on it. He glared at the pattern. It was a bunch of lizards, but when he squinted the space between them was also lizards. His sight shifted back and forth between optical illusions; the hammering pulse in his ears started to abate. Twitchy let out a little breathy sigh, and relaxed on his lap. 

He was only just starting to relax as well when something bulky and gleaming glided soundlessly into his field of view, surrounded by hurried adults. He caught sight of someone clinging face-down onto the long oblong thing, their feet tripping and dragging at times, and the strange committee was nearly out of view when it hit him that the oblong thing was one of the troll-carrying capsules, and the person clinging to it had been Indigo's moirail. 

This time, he felt nothing. His emotional center just sort of stood there toeing his mental floor sheepishly until someone pushed his movable seat through a newly opened entrance.

* * *

The first thing he noticed in this new ambient was that the air went in easier; the gathered crust of countless days of sneezing seemed to go a little looser around his sniffpipes.

He'd been led into a wide block in creamy golden tones. Frothy running-water ablution traps were embedded into the floor, surrounded by rain-simulation apparatuses of varying sizes, and two were occupied— one with Prosthetic Arm trying to keep her little charge from aiming a portable rain-apparatus all over the room, and the other with Seadweller and some other kid sitting awkward and tired together.

The alien servant pushed his seat toward the remaining trap, and he felt as it caught on something underneath. She stepped back, but the device kept on moving; to his confusion and horror it started sinking into the churning water. 

"This is so you won't have to stand on that foot," said the servant, way too calmly, as Karkat clung to Twitchy and watched the water rise around his feet. "I have to take this blanket for now, but there'll be robes when you're cleaned up."

Okay, the water is warm, but oh my god, but no one is drowning, but oh my god, but he really was crazy for an ablution, but oh my god. He didn't even notice the blanket being tugged off; his eyes were glued to the rising water, and when it stopped at mid-chest level he still couldn't quite breathe. 

The hot water made churning noises, the rain apparatuses sprinkled gently around him. The servant set a pile of towels within reach, waved one where he could see it, and waited until Karkat forcibly wrested himself out of his panic to watch owl-eyed as she pushed a button on a faucet and made pearly lather squirt out. 

Okay, he had soap. But oh my god. He took the offered soapy towel. Oh my god. He plopped the towel on Twitchy's chest and made some circular movements, trying to match his breath to the repetitive movement. God. 

He should not be so terrified of a luxury ablution, but here he was, fucking terrified in what was clearly a luxury ablution trap with luxury ablution tools. This probably made him guilty of being an ungrateful little shit, but if there were such a thing as extenuating circumstances in Alternian Law (there wasn't), this would be it.

They were probably dealing with a very rich highblood, one who could afford to flaunt their means by bestowing luxuries upon any shitty guest they got it in their neurons to allow inside. Even the alien slaves were wearing sharp clean uniforms, and they all appeared well-fed and unharmed...

Twitchy squirmed on his lap, slapped the water a bit. Slapped again, harder. Threw his head back on Karkat's shoulder and laughed a weird, slurred, slow laugh, a bizarre and uncomfortable sound that made the mocking _hurrrrr_ s of conversations past retroactively horrifying, and Karkat's guts churned harder than the water. He pushed Twitchy off his chest, turned him around, tucked his small chin over his shoulder. Lathered his back in slow circles.

_Almost everyone was going to make it._ Most of the group did seem to be on track for servitude under a remarkably benevolent nobletroll, and he found himself glader than he expected to, in the circumstances. But if Twitchy made it, obviously damaged as he was, it would only be as a battery. And even if kids sharing his suffering thought nothing of it, adults probably had their own opinions on mutants, and they weren't likely to be positive.

The servant knelt by another trap, used one of the portable rainmakers to wash soap off someone's hair. Karkat felt a little more at ease, enough to push Twitchy back and properly scrutinize his face. Twitchy was grinning lopsidedly, his nose caked with dried phlegm, his hair still crusted with stiff blood that hose-downs upon hose-downs did not dislodge.

Karkat scrubbed Twitchy's underarms, his arms, between his fingers, and plopped the used towel on the floor by the trap. He hesitantly tugged at a rainmaker, a small, palm-sized one, and it detached from its base without issue; Twitchy sputtered extravagantly as Karkat sprinkled his face and hair, pausing every now and then to drink the trickles. He seemed to be having fun. 

Karkat lingered rather too long in the act of tugging crust out of Twitchy's nose. The outsides were soggy and slipped easily, but the insides were clinging stubbornly to his inner filterstrands. He could probably have yanked the crust out without much problem, but instead worried at the caked-on phlegm little by little, pump-biscuit nearly up his mouth. Eventually he moistened another towel and literally picked the other child's nose with it; Twitchy endured these ministrations with nothing but small irritated grumbles. 

Washing his hair was paradoxically a bigger issue. Twitchy hissed and slapped at his own head when Karkat pushed fingertips against his scalp, and kept doing it even when he tried to keep his touch as light as possible. The hair was an unpleasant snarl, part of it looping back and stuck to the base of a horn, and a light tug made him stiffen and spark and grit his teeth in an outright threat; finally he snarled, grabbed a much bigger rainmaker, and pushed it back and forth against Karkat's head as if it were a brush. 

"Need some help?" the servant asked, crouching by their trap; Karkat turned to her and opened his mouth and a small sputtering sob came out, his face covered by a waterfall.

Twitchy was _alive_.

He'd been moving, yes, even before they left the prison block; he'd been reacting, even interacting. Somehow the meaning of it all had only just hit Karkat, in that very moment, as Twitchy acted without prompt or explanation or any sort of logic. The water from Twitchy's raincomb washed his tears away as soon as they came out, and the little brat graduated from brushing to smacking the top of his head, laughing, _hurr hurr hurr_ , the amazing little shit.

The servant seemed to understand. She tugged the rainmaker out of Karkat's slack grip, changed the sprinkle to a jet and fluffled Twitchy's hair under the stronger current; soggy yellow crusts disappeared into the trap's whirlpool, and she did not falter in her work even when Twitchy turned his weapon against her knee with an ominous _huuuurr huh-heeeee_.

Once done, she turned her attention to Karkat's own hair, briskly shaking strands between her fingers and letting rusted-over blood trickle down in chunks. They disappeared under the bubbling water, going who knew where, and Karkat watched them sink without knowing what he was supposed to feel. Then the alien moved on to his back, and Twitchy took up her slack by sprinkling hot water on his face and papping his hair. 

It should be mentioned that Twitchy did not have much fine control over his papping muscles, and papped with his entire arm.

As Twitchy slapped the shit out of his head and the alien scrubbed his back (and underarm and slack arm and between his fingers and—), Karkat's numbed senses started to check back in, slow and tentative: the wet _clean_ smell of the misty block, the neutral mintiness of the soap, the warmth of the water that he'd noticed only on an intellectual level, the way it disguised the pain in his foot, and last but not least, the tarry sensation on his leg right under Twitchy's butt. 

He shifted uncomfortably, trying to turn Twitchy around so his ass would be within scrubbing reach, but now that he'd started to move the kid didn't seem willing to stop fidgeting— even though he was still unsteady in his bones, and kept flopping back whenever Karkat settled him on his knees. 

Finally, Karkat's shaky hand dropped the towel on the sloshing water, and Twitchy almost toppled in right along with it.

"Oop!" said the slave, as if voicing Karkat's mute, numb dismay. She rescued the drenched towel and tugged Twitchy out of Karkat's lap, and Karkat's soapy, surprised hands slipped right off him. She didn't pull Twitchy out of reach, though— she just propped him over the trap border, bent down so the accumulated filth of nights of uncontrolled bowel movement was visible. Twitchy slapped the border and her arm and the tiled floor arhythmically, making nonsense sounds, and seemed the opposite of alarmed even as a complete stranger wiped waterlogged layers of literal shit off his ass. 

Karkat fished another towel and tried to be as discreet as possible about wiping his own. Being submerged in frothy water helped a bit, but the slave seemed way too absorbed with scrubbing Twitchy's legs and toes to be convincing, and then very ostensibly lingered at dabbing eye gunk off his face while Karkat — with great alarm and trepidation — wiped a different kind of crust from submerged parts on his front.

By the time he set the towel aside a padded numbness was starting to wrap around his mind like a comfortable cocoon— a process interrupted by Twitchy being unceremoniously plopped back on his lap.

Twitchy was in full-on squirmy mode, kicking an unsteady leg up, nearly poking Karkat's eye off, chewing on a knuckle and leaning so far back his horns dunked in the water; it was impossible to tell if his gymnastics had any point at all, or if he was merely revelling in the sudden and unexpected recovery of basic motor capabilities. Hell, maybe he was just trying to stretch. Whatever it was, Karkat soon had his hands full trying to keep him from drowning his loopy self.

"I'm going to raise your chair a bit so I can wash your feet," said the alien.

"Whatevbpth," said Karkat, trying to evade the miniature rainmaker that Twitchy was shoving against his mouth. His clumsy hand dropped the apparatus; he pushed his fist against Karkat's lips, blinked, and then slapped a hand into the water, opening and closing his fingers in confusion at the rainmaker's general direction. The object was safely lodged on the kid's own lap, but he was apparently stymied by refraction.

Karkat left him to calculate relative distances on his own. The chair was rising anyway, and soon enough Twitchy grasped the apparatus with a victorious _aaaay_ , dropped it twice more as the slave circled the trap to clean his good leg first, and eventually just stuck it in his own mouth, gnawing weakly and ineffectually. 

Throughout, Karkat was left supporting him with both arms, because his dorsal pillar was about as effective a support as a limp noodle.

The slave finished lathering his good leg, and seemed to consider his broken foot for a moment before wading into the water, clothes and all. She scrubbed his leg normally until halfway down his knee, and then — perhaps sensing his flinches, perhaps taking notice of the shiny taut skin in the area — changed to misty rainmaker sprinkling, interspersed with careful dabs on the more stubborn spots. Another alien was handling the situation on the remaining water traps; the occupants of both had already changed, and Karkat hadn't even noticed.

"Well, we're done!" She said, after one last thorough sprinkling. The other slave brought two reclining seats without any apparent sign or request; from his vantage point halfway into a sunken trap, Karkat could finally spot the fact that they had no wheels, and appeared to be gliding on nothing.

Now that he thought about it, the one he'd been bathing on had no wheels either.

Before he could grasp the implications of this discovery, one of the slaves lifted Twitchy from his lap and held his fidgety, kicking body while the other attempted to wipe his legs dry. Once they were dry enough the extra helper set him down on a seat with visible relief, and raised Karkat's in order to sort-of dry him as well.

Once sort-of dried, the slave relocated him to the recliner, on which some cloth — his "robe", presumably — was laid. 

The first slave was only just finishing wiping Twitchy down. Twitchy had apparently graduated into a huge unhelpful pain in the ass, going floppy and then fidgeting jerkily at intervals, angrily pushing the alien's head away then trying to poke her eye with a meandering, vaguely curious expression on his slack face. She wiped drool from his chin more than once, and eventually just set the towel aside.

"I'll explain about these medical robes now," she said, bravely withstanding Twitchy's attempts at sticking a finger up her nostril. "The underwear I'm about to show you how to fasten is projected to absorb biological waste without leaving residue against the skin. You don't have to make use of this function, but if your foot isn't recovered enough for a trip to the gaper, don't hesitate to."

Did this alien just tell me to shit my special shitting pants, wondered Karkat, staring at the pristine white fabric she was folding around Twitchy's pelvic area. She spoke of fastening, but there was no fastening apparatus he could see; the fabric she overlapped just seemed to stick together spontaneously.

He duplicated her movements on his own weirdly shaped cut of shitting cloth — first wrap the sides, then overlap the front — and ended up with a snug little pair of boxers that held itself closed by, apparently, magic. It was thick, warm and comfortable. He couldn't imagine how it'd absorb literal shit, except by turning into a smeary stain of shame.

The robes underneath worked similarly, as she demonstrated on the unhelpfully wriggling Twitchy (now slapping his own head with a grimace). The fabric was cut to the shape of a dress with detachable sleeves; when his turn came the alien helped him stick the pieces together, and suddenly he was wrapped to his wrists and covered to his shins in pristine-white, warm-smelling clothes, real actual clothes.

Unexplainable tears started running down his face. The alien offered a dry towel with an indulgent smile, which Karkat accepted in confusion and held on his lap for the few seconds it took him to twig onto its supposed use. Everything was slow and laggy and off-kilter, confusing, padded, distant— he buried his face in the towel, and everything else outside that bright white shield seemed to be happening in a different dimension, even the pain in his foot.

Still, when the seat moved under him, he pulled the towel off and forced himself to acknowledge reality. He was being pushed — or floated, or in any case led — out of the ablution block and through a wide, clean corridor, which led into a half-domed block with giant curved viewing panes on its entire length. His mind registered a profusion of dots, colors and lights, and immediately shut them all out.

A small group of children was already in the block, some in floating recliners as well, others seated on things that looked like giant pillows; a handful of adults walked back and forth among them, poking, prodding, smiling, asking questions, tapping at their tablets. Seadweller was being wheeled out in a tank as Karkat arrived, looking small and scared in the floating folds of his robe; not very far from him, the grub was dangling from some contraption in a transparent bag, but a double-take revealed the little shit had been giggling and squealing all along, and remained giggly and squeally even when a gloved alien fished him out of the bag and into a hovering container of sorts. 

The ablution slave left both him and Twitchy in the care of a servant of the smooth-bald-black variety before returning to her inglorious duty. Their seats were attached together somehow, which was nice but for the fact that Twitchy decided to flop an arm to the side and back-hand Karkat's face for reasons known only to the brain-addled. 

The servant very graciously did not point and laugh, though there was certainly a trace of humor in her smile. "Hello," she said, somehow contriving to express elegance and competence in every line of her posture, from her slightly cocked head to the way she held her flimsy tablet. "I'm known as Aleya, and I'm a specialized assistant pediatric healer. What is your name?"

Karkat just laid on his floaty recliner. Sagged even further into it, if such was possible. This slave... servant... _alien_ just asked his name, in smooth and perfect alternian.

His mind whirred like a rusty rodent wheel, and somewhere in the machinery it feebly powered, something tried to go _beep_ but instead went _blebt_. 

"Karkat," he mumbled, entirely on automatic. "Vantas."

She nodded, fingers tapping soundlessly on her tablet. Then she held it up and in front of him, and its back lighted up: KARKAT VANTAS, it read— the characters were alternian, but in a typeface he'd never seen. The effect jarred his already tilted brain even further.

"Is this correct?" she asked, and he could only nod. 

Next, she lowered the tablet to his hand. "Press your palm here, please." He laid his hand on the tablet; it vibrated slightly. "Thank you, and the other one— yes. Thank you. Now—"

She tucked the tablet under an arm. "I'm going to paste this Health Tracker on your wrist." She raised an adhesive ribbon taut between her hands; it was covered in faint geometric patterns. "This will track your body temperature, blood pressure, blood toxicity, stress hormone and pain hormone levels. If any of those spike at any point, one of our onboard healers will come to attend you."

She pasted the adhesive around his limp wrist, then raised her tablet level with his head. The back lighted up once again— and there, glowering tiredly at him, was a gaunt, dead-eyed, wild-haired, cadaverous stranger, his face peppered with myriad little dark-gray burn marks; their collective effect was not unlike one of the several dappled aliens he'd seen so far. 

The little burns seemed to concentrate on the left side of his head and neck. Their sight flooded him with memories of laying his head on Twitchy's chest and being showered in sparks, hugging his torso in fright and wondering if that was it, if the child's last sign of life would be to twist and seize in his arms while puking psionics out of his very pores—

But Twitchy was lying right by him, staring at his own stiff wiggling fingers as if fascinated by an invisible flute.

The alien expertly maneuvered her tablet into his field of view. "Please write your sign here," she said, interrupting all thoughts of invisible woodwind instruments, and left the thing in his hand while she saw to Twitchy.

He stared. The tablet was smooth and dark except for the word "undo" glowing white in the corner. He hesitantly held it in place, unsure of how responsible he was for a slave's property — or work tools as the case may be — but nevertheless proceeded to lay finger to tablet.

He couldn't seem to get his finger steady.

The first circle was lopsided, the curve strayed far out of its path. The second was an absolute disaster. He wasn't shaking, but his hand wavered drunkenly when he held it up without support. He jabbed the undo button in irritation — it took him two tries — but no matter what he did the second arm of his symbol just wouldn't come out right, he couldn't make it right, he couldn't _draw his own symbol_ —

A line of signs blinked above his doodle, with the words _did you mean_ on top. He scrolled through them; none looked like his symbol, and had at most a circle or an arc in common. The fact that they were all white on black just served to turn the collection of lines and loops into an unreadable jumble. He scrolled until the last symbol bounced against the tablet's side, then back, to no avail; he couldn't draw his symbol, and the stupid software couldn't recognize his symbol, and he tried to sit up and just fell back down like a useless chump, and his nose started clogging up inexplicably, and Twitchy was trying to grab a chunk out of his cheek. 

"Do you need help?" asked the alien, leaning over Twitchy to look at the tablet he'd started shaking at some point, and it just pissed him off that she hadn't said anything about his manhandling it, like he had any business shaking people's shit, like _she_ had any business leaning in and staring at what he was doing!

" _Dow!_ " he sobbed out, slapping at her general direction. His palm flopped somewhere around her arm, and she didn't even bother reacting. It just infuriated him further. "It's _by_ see-bol! I cay draw it! Owly I cay't, oh buh god, I _zuck_ —"

A giant bubble of phlegm interrupted his diatribe by suddenly bursting out of his nose, and Karkat could only freeze in horror as it ran over his mouth and down his chin in a sticky rivulet of grossness. Twitchy immediately plopped his hand on it, spattering Karkat's entire face; then he pulled his hand back and stared at the pink snot stretching between his fingers, mumbling an impressed "Huuuuuh".

The alien fished the towel from his lap and wiped the mess on both him and Twitchy in quick movements. "Well, looks like your immune system is back up and running, at least!" She said, way too calmly, and tugged the tablet out of his still frozen hand. "Can you describe your symbol to me?"

"I can't even fuckin' draw by see-bol," Karkat repeated in numb horror. His voice was cracking, and his nose was clogging up again.

"Is the top half like this?" she asked, turning the tablet back to him. He stared: a ball, with a little arc coming out from its top. 

"K-kind of," he admitted. 

"And what is on the bottom?"

He was about to say "the same, but upside down" when the rusty rodent wheel in his thinkpan skipped; the words tumbled off into the void, out of reach. He moved his lips dumbly, waved his hands. By a major effort of will he managed to gesticulate towards the tablet and make rotating motions.

The alien hesitantly turned the tablet, first to the side, then upside down after some more waving, and Karkat finally nodded and sagged back in relief. His head was swirling. He was suddenly unspeakably tired, unspeakably nauseous, unspeakably achey, and couldn't seem to catch his breath. If the alien said anything else, he didn't hear it.

He did notice when the tablet was carefully pushed into his line of sight, his symbol gloriously, prominently displayed, white on black, in its center. He nodded tiredly. The tablet was pulled back.

"Mister _Vantas!_ " someone called cheerfully, and he cracked an eye open (when did they close?) to watch a troll in white and blue approach in wide bouncing steps, one hand pocketed and the other swinging at each step in a wide energetic arc. His eyes were brown. These people were nuts.

He knelt by Karkat's chair, decaptchaloguing the black box from before with a lazy flick of his hand. He seemed to be a smooth sort of bastard, certainly smooth enough that Karkat didn't even see the card.

"Huh, this foot sure does look infected!" he said, in an easy conversational tone. He lifted his tablet, scrolled with a thumb. "No wonder toxicity levels were so high. You're probably feeling kinda confused right now, huh? Don't worry, you'd have been at least half as confused anyway, everyone is! Haha." He opened the box, then a small suitcase of sorts, both filled with unknowable junk. "I'm _Doctor_ Haazen, by the way," he proclaimed, pronouncing the mangled, truncated word with obvious pride. "Sanvik Haazen! At your service." And he winked.

"You can't even say your job name," Karkat mumbled, narrowing his eyes at the troll. The asshole just burst into laughter in the middle of digging out a sheet of tissue and a small tangled hose. 

The alien made herself known again by touching Karkat's hand with the tablet. He blinked at it, then at her.

"What's it now?" he asked, and then felt embarrassed at the note of whining in his voice.

"Nothing," she said, smiling guilelessly. "The preliminary census form has been completed; this computer is now yours." She gently deposited the flimsy, lightweight plane on his lap. "Welcome to the United Galaxies, Karkat."

She casually turned around to putter out of view, then hunched her shoulders and giggled; by the time she turned back to Twitchy, new tablet in hand, she was as serene and smooth as ever, and the doctor could only look at her in confusion before shrugging and spraying Karkat's foot with cold liquid.

"Your friend seems to be non-verbal," the alien commented, looking dubiously at Twitchy; he'd gone back to insistently slapping his own head at some point. "Can you tell me his name?"

"No," said Karkat. Then he felt the answer made him seem purposefully uncooperative, and added: "He was already weird when he fell on me."

"By weird, do you mean moving erratically, speaking unintelligibly and striking himself?" she asked.

It took him some time to parse her words, and even then he wasn't sure whether Twitchy's behavior counted as some of that or not. Her neutral tone made it hard for him to figure out what she wanted. In the end he resorted to just describing what he saw.

"He had seizures," he started, "and when he didn't he just sort of lay around. I-it wasn't _that_ bad," he added, hurriedly; what if they decided he was a lost cause? "He was just, you know, unconscious, he's probably just shocked because his lusus died on top of him."

"How do you know that?" she asked, and Karkat found himself completely stumped. How did he? He was sure he'd learned that from Twitchy somehow, but that was crazy talk, Twitchy had never been this lively and he still couldn't do much better than slapping himself and poking people's eyes. He vaguely remembered some sort of evidence, but—

"His hair," he mumbled waving vaguely at his own head. "There was blood. His lusus' blood."

He turned to the alien, intent and imploring, but she avoided his eyes; instead, she focused on Twitchy.

"Can you understand what I'm saying?" she asked, her lips grimly pressed together. "Touch your nose if you understand me."

Twitchy paused in his strikes to blink owlishly at her, then scrunched his face in clear discomfort and went right back to it.

"Heloisa added a note about washing a head wound just now," said the brownblood in blue, without looking up from his work. "It's probably his."

She nodded with a sigh, tapped at the tablet and raised it over Twitchy's face. He was immediately distracted from his slapping spree by a bunch of eye-searing colors dancing around on the device's back, which had the amazing property of making him sit still and stare open-mouthed; she was presumably recording his wide-eyed, stupefied face for posterity. 

Karkat checked the back of his device. Nothing but smooth light gray.

"That's it for now, then," she said, putting the tablet in Twitchy's hands — he seemed absolutely elated — and immediately raising another over his head, moving it this way and that as if she could see through it. "Do you think they tried to rig him up, Haazen?"

"Might be," he said, sounding absorbed in his work. "Check for localized burns and left-over wiring just in case."

Karkat squinted at the troll. Docterrorist Haazen was crouched over his swollen foot, also staring intently through his own tablet. Did it serve as a lens? Was he scrutinizing the weird bruises and creepy lightning-shaped stains spreading up his leg? Seemed likely.

A crumpling sound right by his ear snapped him out of his musing. The wafer-thin tablet lay crumpled between Twitchy's clumsy fingers in a multifaceted mess. 

" _No!_ " he blurted out, tangling his fingers with Twitchy's so he'd let go of the shards. He'd barely gotten started when a different kind of fear smacked him like a brick, and he threw himself over the child before the words "property loss" and "displeasure" even formed in his mind.

"Sorry!" he squeaked out, glancing from adult to slave in turns; and since they seemed entirely too impassive, he added: "Don't...!" before running out of breath.

But the troll just snickered, shaking his head to himself. He put his tablet aside to pick a cracked, dangling one from the floor— was it Karkat's? _Shit it was_ — firmly tugged at two opposing corners and, to Karkat's surprise, the thin rectangle was back to looking as smooth and unbroken as ever.

"Ta-dah!" the troll presented the miraculously healed device with a flourish. "Technology is an awesome thing!" Then he sobered up, laying the tablet on Karkat's covered knee. "And you're a brave kid. Nothing bad's going to happen."

Karkat felt confused, then stupid, then angry. "I'm not—" he protested on automatic. "I just— it's _basic decency_ , okay?"

"Yeah, and isn't it _rare_ in the Empire!" he said, cheerfully. "Now loosen up or you'll make your foot worse. I'm not done with it yet!"

Belatedly, Karkat noticed that he'd curled his legs onto the seat in his panic, and the pain was starting to register. It probably showed on his face; the docterrorist and the alien joined forces to physically relocate his limbs, a process his mind gladly blanked out on, and when he returned they were just done adjusting Twitchy so his horns stopped jabbing Karkat's neck.

Twitchy went back to crumpling his tablet, and the other two went back to waving theirs over Karkat's foot and Twitchy's head.

"Well, your foot's not broken, and you won't need surgery" said the Docterrorist eventually, leaning back on his heels with a sigh. "It's just dislocated, and I can relocate it manually. The bad news is there's a fuckton of pus. This will take some cleaning before I can pop it back in place."

He draped Karkat's foot in a fluttery tissue — which immediately crumpled and adhered to his wet skin — and got to his feet. "We'll just do standard checkup while that one runs."

"That's paper," Karkat pointed out.

"Just to loosen some lymph," he said absently, as if there had been a question implied in Karkat's words and this answer made sense in relation to it. "We could do without, but it'd be way more work."

He picked a tube and a collection of thin ampules from his valise, and inserted the latter into the former. Then he unpeeled Karkat's sleeve from shoulder to elbow and touched the tube to his arm, and it sort of— pistoned— pushed— against his flesh with a pneumatic hiss; tingly coldness spread from the touch. 

"That's the first immunization," he said, distractedly tugging the sleeve back in place, and tossed the tube into a nearby discard receptacle. "Now while that's spreading on this arm I'm going to take a little bit of blood from your _other_ arm." He opened the other sleeve lengthwise and buckled a bracelet somewhere above Karkat's elbow. "This'll tighten up a little, but only for five seconds. Wow, you're tense! Don't worry, it barely even tingles— make a fist— I swear your arm will still be there when we're done, haha!"

Karkat clenched his fist and nearly every muscle in his body with strength greater than he'd been able to summon in nights. Ice ran in his veins and out his pores—

The docterrorist touched a small box to the crook of his elbow—

Karkat's wide eyes focused on it—

Open top, a bunch of small glass ampules—

One was suddenly sprayed in scarlet—

His body went _twang_ and sagged in defeat. 

It barely tingled, on his fingertips. His surroundings were corkscrewing slowly, as if his recliner had gone adrift. His ears were whistling, but everything else was silence. An eternity went by and it didn't come; the strike, the scream, the slash, the darkness. Nothing.

A morbid impulse drove him to turn his eyes back to the Docterrorist. The troll was sitting at his feet, holding his wrist in one hand. His other hand held the little box in place. There were eight small ampules in it, very small and squatty indeed, and the last one was only just starting to fill with bright candy red. 

Docterrorist Haazen boggled at the ampules with eyes nearly halfway out of their sockets. 

The ampule filled. A light blinked on the box, and the Docterrorist pulled it away from Karkat's arm. 

"Well—" he squeaked, "you— bore that very bravely! Yeah!" He wheezed, glanced up at Karkat's face with wide stupefied eyes, snapped the box closed and slotted it in the black box with quick practiced movements. 

Then he pushed his hair back with a hand, turned to the snickering alien standing by Twitchy and said—

" _Dang!_ "

* * *

Karkat felt his limbs start to shiver. It was... weird, an entirely physical reaction completely divorced from his state of mind; the fear had come and gone already, and now he was just waiting. Floaty and faint.

Somewhere above his head, the alien had burst into outright laughter.

"Gosh, I'm sorry!" she guffawed, touching his shoulder. "I'm so sorry. _But did you see the look on his face—_ "

The troll was staring into nothing, sitting on his heels, but somehow managed to spare a leg to kick at her general direction.

"You're still wearing it, actually—"

He kicked again, then fell on his butt.

"Well, look who's out of shape!"

The troll went "grrr" under his breath, clambered back to his knees, dusted his hands.

"You are an evil, evil woman," he said, and turned to Karkat, still looking a little wild around the eyes. "She's an _evil_ woman!"

"Look, I recorded him," said the alien, pushing her device into Karkat's line of sight. It showed the Docterrorist setting the box on the soft skin of his elbow junction, then raising his head with a confident little grin. The small thin arm invading the shot was corded with visible tendons; when a bit of red showed up in the box, it went floppy like a dropped puppet. The bracelet above his elbow popped open and fell. The docterrorist glanced down at the arm with a look of vague worry and did a double-take, his eyes widening and chin dropping in a manner that Karkat could accept was, theoretically speaking, comedic.

He looked up at the alien. She was smiling softly at him, but he couldn't seem to find it in himself to laugh.

"I guess it was uncalled for," she said, her voice gentle. "I apologize."

He didn't answer. The dark face floating over him was spreading into a blur like wet ink, running out of logic. 

"Shit, he's crashing," said a voice. Someone patted his hand. "Hey, kiddo? V- _Vantas_?" There was pressure; a fog he hadn't seen approach started to lift from around his head, and a slap to the face brought him back the rest of the way.

"What— what are you gonna do...?" he mumbled into Twitchy's hand, uncrossing his eyes to try and focus on the docterrorist. Unlike before, the adult's face was now very hard to read. 

"Well..." he said slowly, considering, possibly distracted by the sight of Twitchy squeezing Karkat's lips into a pout. "First, I'm going to shine a little light in your ear, then on your sclera," he pointed to his own, respectively. (Twitchy pulled his hand back, then looked at it as if expecting to find Karkat's mouth in his grasp.) "It shouldn't be uncomfortable unless you look straight into the light, so make sure to keep your eyes on that point while I check." He turned and pointed. Karkat didn't look where. "Then I'm going to shine the light in your nostrils and your throat— this is really just to make sure nothing is damaged in there— and then I'm going to put a few cannulas in your foot and drain the pus—"

"...aren't you going to cull me?" 

Karkat didn't even feel fear as he asked, just weariness— but the docterrorist threw his hands up in the kind of comically theatrical overreacting that usually hid something real.

"Sweet god, no!" He leaned forward on a knee, took Karkat's limp hand in an oddly romantic gesture. "Vantas— _Karkat_. Regardless of your blood color, there's literally no one in this ship who wouldn't fight to keep you alive. And let me tell you a secret— this ship alone is full of awesome, fantastically brave people with red blood _just like you_."

Karkat heard the words, understood their meaning, but didn't feel anything. Seconds later he still most definitely wasn't feeling anything, but his face seemed to be tingling— and the hopeful smile spreading on the docterrorist's face was upsetting and overwhelming—

"Yes!" He said, breathlessly. "Every day in this universe I run across all sorts of amazingly brave and kind people with scarlet in their veins!" He raised his shoulders a little, squeezed Karkat's hand. "You just happen to be the first one of them to be a troll."

Karkat sat still, feeling the warmth of the brownblood docterrorist's hand seep into his fingers little by little. He was struck even dumber than he was before, but... things were clearing up, his mind was— the gentle drift of his seat resolved in the sway of his head and he let it flop back against the seat, noticing once again how breathless he was, how tired, viscerally so. He felt like he was filling the insides of his own skin again, uncomfortable as it currently was. 

He took a trembling breath and his nostrils burst with phlegm. His eyes were leaking. He was crying. He wasn't even sobbing. He was just leaking from his eyes and nose like he'd been constipated all along, emotionalways, and his feelgland was starting to get back up and running again.

The alien stepped around to his side of the recliner, leaned down to show him a needle and her finger; she stabbed the finger with the needle and even though he could see it coming, even though he could understand the meaning of the gesture beforehand, the bright candy red bead that bloomed on her dark skin still hit him like a punch to the back of the head, and he started sobbing in great hitching hiccups. 

He clutched the black hand, shaking and sobbing and staring at that one single bead through a blurry pink film of tears. Her skin was firm, smooth and supple, alien but not unpleasant to the touch; he looked up and squinted at her face, wondering if there was anything else that they might have had in common, that the strange color they both shared might have some sort of meaning. 

She let him cling to her hand and examine her face for what felt like a ridiculously long time (was that kindness in her smile? Was it wishful thinking?) before gently disengaging. Well, of course, he was being, he was— but she put a hand on his chest, another on his back, gently arranged him back on the recliner, pulled a fresh towel from thin air as if by magic; Twitchy draped himself over his torso in a sudden effusion of affection, or at least energy, and made a concerted effort to slide off the other side of their joined seats.

He was amazing, he felt amazing, he was so attuned to his new friend that when she held the towel around his nostrils he knew right away to blow his nose. Even the docterrorist seemed inordinately happy as he stuck a small tickly thing in his ears and nostrils and looked inside his mouth and shone a thing in his eyes, and if there was any discomfort involved Karkat didn't so much as register it.

"Well!" the docterrorist eventually crouched back down by Karkat's foot, rubbing his hands together. "Time to handle this one."

He slowly lifted the paper from Karkat's foot. It'd gone stiff and crackly and crumpled in big thick veins, and the skin underneath was saggy and squishy where it had been taut and shiny. The bruises were even more violently colored than before, in downright bizarre shades.

"That's more like it," the docterrorist said, apparently satisfied by whatever he saw through his tablet. He dug out a pile of esoteric implements from his case, then pressed another pneumatic tube on the area under his knee, first one side, then the other. "This will make your leg go numb for a while," he explained. "You won't feel any pain, but it might feel a little weird."

"I'll take it," Karkat quipped, feeling downright giddy. "I'll take a billion of those. I'm already weird! Everything is weird! You're weird. You're a total weirdo. You're wearing blue. My _foot_ is fucking blue. It's purulent. Pustulescent. Call me Your Imperious Pustulescension. _Oh god i feel so much better already_."

He wasn't exaggerating. Everything from his knee down felt half-floaty-half-gone, but the absence of pain alone liberated resources he hadn't even noticed were unaccounted for. He was suddenly aware of the size of the block, the people in it, the way Twitchy fidgeted non-stop at his side; the steady traffic of newly cleaned kids being led in, given tablets, prodded at, walked out. 

The way the personnel in blue markers kept glancing his way, aliens and trolls alike. Oh well, he could accept he was novelty if nothing else. He tossed up a middle-finger to one of them, then pointedly turned to look down at whatever Docterrorist Hazothingabob was doing to him.

"Did you just rig up an honest-to-god virtual reality game around my foot, or." He waved a hand at the limb. There were a bunch of wires glued to his foot — or maybe cannulas, and probably _into_ his foot — but the truly strange thing was the table-shaped contraption around it, and how it was apparently spitting out some cosmic scenery into the air above.

The docterrorist didn't answer, staring down at the virtual cosmos with a look of intense concentration. He pushed a wire — cannula — into his ankle. A thick tube suddenly snaked into the floating image. 

"There!" the docterrorist muttered to himself; he'd put on gloves at some point, and made an aborted gesture as if he'd been about to rub them together. Instead he looked up at Karkat. "You asked something?"

"Nothing," said Karkat, hurriedly. 

"Okay, then!" He raised a jar. "Wanna see what comes out?"

Karkat nodded despite himself.

What came out was... yellow. Not Sollux-yellow, but a bright yellow with spots of almost-green and, sometimes, great thick patches of pinkish brown. It splorted and oozed into the jar from the myriad cannulas, thick and viscous, settling in layers of unpleasant shades; it had the apparent consistency of the stuff Karkat horked out in early evenings during cough season.

"Oh _god_ ," he said, deeply regretting signing up for the display. "Just. Just chop it off. I won't miss it." He laid back on the recliner. In sympathy, Twitchy tried to feed him his crumply tablet, wet with drool.

"Nah, nonsense!" said the docterrorist, as mercilessly cheerful as ever. "Give it a day or so and it'll be good as new, wanna bet?"

"No," Karkat said, then pursed his lips shut to keep Twitchy from pushing the tablet in.

"Well, in that case." He picked his tablet back up. "Aleya?"

"I found a trepanation hole," she said, businesslike, from Twitchy's side. Karkat was suddenly unspeakably embarrassed by his reaction to her blood color, and made a likely useless effort to look inconspicuously dignified in his recliner, tablet in nostril or no. "Outer base of inner left horn. Starting from picture twenty-eighty-five."

" _Hsssss_ ," the docterrorrist sucked air through his teeth, glaring down at the tablet. "I see it. And this nasty cement, too— shoddy-ass job. And they got his hair in! _Assholes._ "

"That's the only hole, though," she said. "It looks like they gave up on installing him when they used the wrong drill. That, or they tried installing with one big hole instead of several small ones, _then_ gave up. There are signs of—"

"I see it!" he said, scrolling furiously. "This is some major swelling, Ley, give him some— yes, I see, twenty milligrams, good. What _is_ this—"

He squinted at the tablet. The alien tapped at hers. (What was her name again? Karkat hadn't been paying attention when she introduced herself. God but he was such an asshole.)

"It looks like a set of leftover wiring barbs," she said. "That's why I wonder if they weren't trying to rig him up with a single hole. They laid down the barbs, but the logistic issues became apparent before they added the neurowires."

"Hm, yes, if these punctures are from barbs they pulled out— but the shredding is minimal, thank god. Why be this careful in extraction when you didn't bother on insertion?"

"They did intend to sell him," she pointed out. "And there's an entire barbed track left behind, so they clearly ran out of patience at some point."

"Ugh." He grimaced. "Yes. Well." He tapped in silence for a while, frowning, then set the tablet aside. "That's all to start with," he said, sounding tired and not at all cheerful for once. 

The alien scrolled through hers. "Twelve hours?" she asked, sounding dubious. "Even with hourly energy supplements, don't you think that's way too fast for the nanites? He's already malnourished as it is."

"Then make them half-hourly," grouched the docterrorist. "I've never had clamps in my pan, but god knows I've had plenty of nightmares about it. The sooner they're gone, the sooner I can breathe and the sooner he can heal!"

Karkat sputtered. "He can _what?_ "

* * *

It felt like an eternity had passed before their "basic health whatever" was over, though the big clock on Karkat's tablet hadn't advanced much more than ten minutes. Another alien was pushing their floating seats now, destination unknown; the brownblood docterrorist and the red-blooded alien were left behind to deal with another slew of sickly, wary children. 

Karkat thoughtfully sucked on his complimentary banana-berry smoothie. His foot was almost back to its original shape, and though the toes peeking out of the tight dark-blue sock were still fat, they were not as bad as they had been. He'd also been assured that the painkillers would last several hours. 

His elbow brushed the bump under Twitchy's sleeve where a bulky bracelet sat, poised to inject a giant list of medical substances at automated intervals. He now knew more about the standard helmsman installation process than he'd ever wished to, made worse by the awareness that the adults were visibly trying to understate and gloss over the little they'd been willing to speak of it. 

Yet... the technology this mysterious crew had access to could break the neural clamps down into harmless proteins — a process that, in a fully-fitted adult, could take from six very hurried seasons to a sweep and a half of carefully monitored nibbling — and all it took was a couple of regular injections and a set of very precise instructions. No surgeries required, no daggerscalpels, no bonesaws. 

Docterrorist Haazen had admitted to lacking knowledge in the field of regenerative neuromedicine — _there was an entire field of regenerative neuromedicine_ — but apparently it was not uncommon to come across a half-fitted child in space, and he was "qualified to initiate standard emergency removal procedures". In twelve hours, the wiring barbs would be but a soup of carbon chains for Twitchy's body to absorb. That was twelve hours too many, in the humble docterrorist's estimate; an estimate Karkat agreed wholeheartedly with. 

Another estimate, completely unexpected, was that of full recovery. 

Twitchy moaned, a long, stretched, painful sound, muffled by the crumpled ball of advanced tech he was drooling copiously around. His face was serene and content. His left eye wandered lazily upwards and disappeared under his eyelid, while his right eye stared into the ceiling. 

As a very general ballpark, taking into account the relatively small amount of damage compared to the usual cases(!), Docterrorist Haazen had tossed up a sweep of treatment until _that_ attained full recovery. A _sweep_. To heal holes in one's brains. (Oh but, Haazen had helpfully clarified, he'd be showing improvement long before then!)

A docterrorist could look into Twitchy's brain without opening his head and say his motor system appeared the least affected, then send them away on a recliner that floated with no apparent hovering mechanism, no sparks, no smoke, not even a hum. 

Why are adults hiding this sort of tech, he wondered, then berated himself for stupidity. This shit was probably kept out of circulation by the upper crust, like decent resources usually were. Some snooty highblood just felt like letting them in a personal space-yatch (hadn't he already reached this conclusion before?) and had enough clout to toss incredibly select, state-of-the-art and possibly classified luxury items at servants and starving brats like a giant show-off.

He wasn't satisfied by that conclusion — it didn't quite seem to add up — but was forced to shelve the matter for the moment; they'd just reached a wide open arch, beyond which lay comforting dimness and a racket of voices.

The voices lowered, then rose again.

"Hey look, it's Mutie!"

"And the retard!"

"Whoever just said the word _retard_ ," said Karkat, solemnly, "step up and come in reach of my slapping hand."

The request generated laughter, even though he was being at least sixty-five-percent serious.

The arch led to a spacious block, furnished with wide white shelves — on which some of them had draped themselves — and an enormous pillow mound in the middle, the contents of which were currently flying around merrily all over the place.

The alien pushed their recliners around the mound, stopping now and then to allow the passage of a speeding brat, and eventually settled their seats right by Seadweller's tank, helpfully turned to the entrance. To his right was a small stand with a bowl of fruits, which the alien pushed closer to him, and a little further past it he could see some sort of elaborate basket on a platform; its contents shuffled and scratched non-stop, and every now and then a small yellow dome peeked into sight, or a trio of small horns waved over the edge as a small head looked around itself before resuming its job. Shuffle, shuffle, scratch; whatever the grub was doing, it was being particularly meticulous about it.

Its small eyes trained on Karkat, and it perked up and chirped plaintively; the sound had a soulful, touching quality to it that made the back of Karkat's brain sit up and refuse to settle down. The grub kept calling out in anxious churrs; he made a half-hearted attempt to tune it out, but eventually gave in and made a display of setting his cup down on his lap, if only to let the grub know it had his attention. 

It immediately went silent and sunk back up to its eyes into the basket, leaving nothing visible but a shiny leg resting on the edge.

Karkat huffed in annoyance and went back to his smoothie, but the plaintive chirps came back with added urgency; he once again set the cup down, grudgingly (stupid brain fretting over damn chirps), only for the grub to repeat the pointless ritual. This time, though, it finally hit Karkat that the grubleg it was laying on the edge _had been missing not too long ago_.

He squinted. The leg was... _very_ shiny, as well as transparent. The shininess reached up to and wrapped around the previous legstub like a slick glove.

"...nice paw," Karkat mumbled, unsure what he was looking at. A prosthetic leg? On a grub?

The grub seemed satisfied with his reaction, at least; it squealed in delight and jumped back into its basket in some sort of dance. It... really did just want to show him its new claw, huh. Damn smart for a grub. (Karkat knew nothing of the average intelligence of a grub.)

A pillow came flying into Karkat's face, interrupting his thoughts and smacking the smoothie cup right out of his hand. Good thing it was mostly empty, he thought as he watched the cup tumble down to Twitchy's lap and off to the floor; somehow it didn't even spill the dregs. That was some good smoothie cup engineering, he thought with approval, then wondered just what the flying fuck he was even thinking about. 

Some kid came running for the pillow, only to slow down to a stop and stare at Twitchy in confusion. Twitchy stared back, slurping loudly around his crumpled tablet and grinning in something close to cheek.

"He does that," said Karkat, because the kid was just looking increasingly more dubious. 

The kid visibly shook himself out of some weird thoughts, turning to Karkat in surprise. "Does what?" he asked, appearing utterly mystified.

"Well," Karkat hesitated. "Drool, mostly. Gnaw on the tablet, stare at people, flop around like a fish and then laugh at you. It's not personal."

"Um," said the kid, still looking very dubious. "I guess they can't all be right, then?"

"I guess," Karkat repeated, his tired mind tripping over itself to try and figure out how that question fit the topic.

"Well, whatever!" the kid waved his hand as if slapping some hovering specter away. "Can I have the pillow back? Sorry it fell on you."

Karkat picked up the offending item. It was shaped like a very fat tube, and he had to admit it was remarkably squishy and pleasant to the touch. He squeezed it a few times before handing it over.

"It's such a nice pillow, right?" the kid asked, excitedly. "There's a few that are all warm from the inside, they're a little bigger than this— look over there, like that one, see? See?" He pointed somewhere in the direction of the pillow mound. "And oh, maybe the servant forgot to tell you, I see he's talking to Zellie now, huh, but see this thing in the wall here? This one here?" He slapped at some indentation in the wall which Karkat hadn't even noticed before. "It's a water dispenser! The cups are here! And you can toss the cups down in this round hole here when you're done. And there are fruits in this big bowl here and there's little bowls in this little door here!" He opened a door on the bowl stand. "Want one?" He pushed a bowl into Karkat's slack hand without waiting for an answer. "Or maybe I should put some fruit in it!" He pulled the bowl back, grabbed a handful of fruit at random, then pushed the now filled implement in his still slack hand. "And that's a big entertainment screen over there, you see it there?" He pointed to the arch they'd come in through; a screen was projected into the air, exhibiting what appeared to be a screensaver. "They said they'll put some movies and music for us and stuff. There's a lot of cool things here! And oh— oh— you did the thingy in the tablet thingy yet? You should! Because—"

" _Shoosh!_ " Karkat barked, patience finally frayed. "Fucking hell, don't you get tired? How do you even have that much energy to prattle, I'm basically dying here. What are you so cheerful about?"

"Hehe!" the kid giggled, completely unfazed by Karkat's thunderous frown. "Well, we're like two-parts saved already, you know?"

"No, I don't. What do you mean two-parts saved?"

"Well... there's some more saving to go," the kid said, slowly, a bit dubiously. "I'm not sure what from? Maybe we'll get very sick. Veshna is convinced there'll be explosions, but he's a giant smelly grump. Anyway we're safe for the time being."

"Wow, that wasn't ominous _at all_!" Karkat raised his hands in a big display of fake cheerfulness. "Who the fuck is Veshna? Or Zellie?"

"See, that's why I'm telling you you need to do the thingy. Everyone's got their names up! And you can talk to people too, look—" he pointed to the big padded shelves on the side walls. Some of the trolls occupying them were tapping at their own tablets, though others seemed to have conked out, and one was instead clinging with arms and legs around a giant pillowtube. "They're all sending each other some sort of serious business stuff."

"What he _means_ ," said a voice from Twitchy's direction; Karkat almost jumped off his skin, "is that completin' the setup on the tablet gives you access to everyone's public profile, an' you can message 'em and all."

Karkat had utterly forgotten about the tank sitting quietly by Twitchy's left. Seadweller was clinging to its border, head above the water, and his voice was hugely improved from before. His robe had two big openings over his gills — which were swollen and flushed violet and had whitish strands floating off them like clingy lint — but judging from his face he was doing just fine, thank you.

"Hey there," Karkat gasped, still trying to recover from the thought of Twitchy suddenly bursting into shitty forced violetblood twang right by his ear, possibly followed by pea soup.

"C'mon, Yonny, be a good an' let the little wiggler breathe," said the violetblood, waving the kid away in imperious dismissal before turning to Karkat. (The kid didn't move.) "Veshna's the cranky psychic with a half-crushed windpipe, an' Zellie's right over there chattin' it up with the alien—"

This time, Karkat did turn to look. Looking willowy and elegant in her robe and a hair-knot was Water Girl, speaking serious and businesslike with the hornless alien. A couple of the older teenagers from the door vanguard were also standing nearby, listening in intently and crowding the alien in just enough to be uncomfortable. For his part, the alien seemed befuddled, but not intimidated; he nodded, smiled, looked serious, shook his head, spoke something at length. 

All of a sudden it hit Karkat that the alien was inside their block, he was just standing there chilling _inside their block_ , and the arch was wide open and there was no door and nothing to keep anyone from striding in—

"You're gonna drop the fruit," warned the little kid, stepping up to hold the bowl steady.

"Th-th-they can just walk in!" It felt like the words were tripping on Karkat's tongue on the way out of his mouth.

"Well, yeah, how else are they gonna bring us fruit?" he pointed out.

"Also," said Seadweller, "they send a little notice beforehand. On the tablet. Sayin' what they're bringin'. Speakin' of—" he sunk back into the water; his tablet was apparently stuck to the inner glass wall. On resurfacing he wore a small, amused smirk. "Welp, looks like they're bringin' in a proper entertainment projector curtain. The screen did look a bit washed out with all that light from outside bleedin' through, good to see they were aware a' the issue—"

A pair of claps interrupted whatever smug rant he was gearing up to: Water Girl— Zellie— was calling for attention. The alien was gone somewhere. 

"Listen up, everyone!" she started. "They just promised to take _five of us_ on a tour of the ship. I'm in, and so is Kappei." She waved to the vanguard teen by her side, someone Karkat vaguely remembered having spouted trivia about spy bugs at some point. "Who else wants to go? _Big ones only!_ "

She studiously ignored the profusion of small hands waving from the pillow pile, turning around to check the shelves instead. 

Raspy — Veshna, if his raspiness was caused by the half-crushed windpipe Seadweller had alluded to — very nearly somersaulted from one, landing by Zellie and looking ready as anything. Another lanky, androgynous teen stepped into the group, looking as bizarrely pretty as an off-context elf, and completing the group was, of all people, Poop Dude. Even Yonny skipped off towards Zellia, waving a hand above his head, undaunted by the fact that the group was complete; he didn't seem upset at being waved off either, instead making a detour to the pillow pile and throwing himself in it with wild gusto.

As for the tour group, they just stood there, talking amongst each other in low voices and sort of waiting around for the guide to come.

Karkat set the bowl on his lap, nibbled on an apple slice. Despite the previous lack of food he couldn't seem to muster any appetite; he felt empty, but not hungry. Then again, he'd just finished a fairly big smoothie cup. Figuring the smoothie would be enough nourishment for the moment, he busied himself with biting off small pieces of apple, and then strawberry, and feeding them to Twitchy, who accepted them eagerly. Half the bowl went down his voracious gullet; at least his attention was off the crumpled ball of tablet for a moment. 

That done, he finally spared some attention to his tablet device. Rather than a black screen with sparse white symbols, it now sported an elegant, pleasantly smooth silvery interface. His picture (gaunt, cadaveric, burn-stained) was up on a corner, with his name and symbol at its side as well as a gray square where he guessed his blood color was supposed to go in— it was hardly a secret anymore, but still... he skipped the field for the time being. 

There were also input fields for gender, wriggling day (and hatching day and _laying day_ , whatever that was) and a bunch of social media fields: trollian handle, facetome name, snipechat nick, plus a whole bunch of others he'd never bothered with, including shit like furrability which no sane troll would ever want to join. 

He added his wriggling day and trollian handle, then lowered the tablet to his chest. His thinkpan felt stuffed and overwhelmed, and something about the profile was bringing up half-formed thoughts he didn't want to examine too closely. He was tired and didn't want to think, and the fact that he couldn't afford not to was getting to him.

(Maybe it was the font, he thought. Yeah, that was probably it. The font wasn't ugly, or hard to read, but it was different from the official Trolltype and the change was probably giving him cognitive dissonance. On top of literally all the other changes.)

He looked around himself instead. The entertainment projector curtain had arrived, a rectangle cut to measure that was now being hung on the arch and which fit the projection perfectly. The kids gathered on the pillow pile clapped their hands, and the two aliens who'd brought it in bowed; surprisingly enough there was plenty of space around and under the curtain for people to come and go (probably bearing fruits), and even as he looked, another group of robed children walked in— Prosthetic Arm, now with a _new_ prosthetic arm, her small charge (and it was small indeed, literally the tiniest child Karkat had ever laid eyes upon) and, lying on a recliner of his own, the Jade Blood, looking rather like he'd played dice with the Demoness for his life. 

He waved Karkat's way, smiling a small, rueful smile. Karkat waved back. With his burns, he probably cut a worse picture.

A group gathered around Prosthetic Arm, poking and prodding at the new limb; she showed off her acquisition with a wide, proud grin, moving the arm every which way to display how the strange mesh braids around it contracted and rippled like real muscles. Vague impressed sounds came from the crowd, and the grub chirped insistently at them, no doubt anxious to show off his new limb as well. (A kid nearby successfully shut him up by giving his claw approving noises.)

"Okay, guys, we're off to check the ship now!" Zellie called out. "I sent everyone a message to follow the Ship Tour tag and we'll be uploading pictures and telling you if we find anything interesting. And the lot who's not done with their profiles yet — you know who you are! — just get off your asses already, yes, you too Mutie, I'm gonna eat that finger, see if I don't."

Karkat raised another finger, and kept them both raised until the group crossed the dimmed corridor and went out of sight. Spying on the ship was an interesting enough prospect to push him to finish the damn profile setup; after some mulling over, he decided the meowbeast was out of the bag anyway, and tapped the gray square. 

He had _not_ expect his color to be there, but it was— it, and several others that didn't exist in the hemospectrum either. His... was still the brightest and strangest one, by far, but it still made him wonder just how many non-standard shades were likely to make it to space and fill in a tablet profile anyway. They even had lime, for fuck's sake! And an option to input a custom color. Was this actually a text color selector? Text colors had more leeway...

He selected red anyway, and clicked on next before he could change his mind about it.

The next page was asking about special abilities, plus whether they should be public, private to self or private to group. He didn't have any psychic powers, precognitive abilities, telechnectic skills or specific physical prowess to speak of; he set everything to public and tapped "no" on them all, and on "other" he wrote _the ability to recognize bullshit from a mile away_ before advancing to the next stage. 

Previous hive location. Hobbies ( _watching movies, reading books, coding viruses, sucking at coding, blowing computer parts in dumb ways_ ). Favorite artists ( _Troll Will Smith_ ). Favorite food. Favorite song. Favorite this. Favorite that. Inane questions, mostly about what he used to like and do before a bunch of pirates came and spoiled his night, and about what he'd probably have been doing if a bunch of pirates hadn't showed up to make his life hard. Eventually he got fed up and started scrolling past vast swaths of input fields; his favorite type of underwear ( _super special shitting pants_ ) surely wasn't relevant to setting up some dumb tablet profile, right?

Eventually he figured out the questions were optional, and the advance button had been on the top of the screen all along; tapping it _finally_ led to a list of names and pictures — _find friends to chirp with!_ — all of them children, all of them haggard, some making faces and silly poses with their new block as the background. That was a picture of Soft Voice smiling around a pineapple slice— add Bianka Volita, cerulean? How about the Yonny kid that had been bugging him just now— Yoaney Eidrik, brown? They finally had names, colors and symbols, rather than random nicknames adopted for the sake of keeping the peace. Have any fights broken out already, he wondered. And what the fuck was _chipper_ and why was it prominently written on top of the screen?

He went down the list following everyone he saw, matching face to name where he could. Wide-horns was Radufe Seanne, olive, his profile picture replaced by an amazingly douchetastic selfie. Grate Keeper was Koumar Svante, also olive, and listed alchemy as a hobby. Water Girl was rust, full name Zellie Inayat, and so was Raspy, full name Veshna Nemaya. Seadweller was named Sorrel Tarrak, and the Jadeblood was Verlus Zeleni. And then there was the grub.

" _Bobbit_ ," said Karkat, out loud, mostly in disbelief. It didn't even have a second name! And to top it off, he could see the grub raise its head in attention at the word. How did it even fill the profile? It was a fucking grub!

"Haha, yeah," said Irritable Girl, come to filch some fruit from the big bowl and looking fairly non-irritated. "They asked us to come up with a name for him and that was the one that made him laugh, so it stuck."

"Him? It's male now?" Karkat waved his tablet, not sure if he wanted to smack her head with it or what. 

"The docterrorists say there's a seventy-five percent chance he's male, so..." she shrugged.

"Aff!" Karkat threw his hands up in defeat. 

By that point he was starting to get pop-down notices on the tablet — little bars lowering from the top of the screen with suggestions to follow trending tags sporting fascinating posts such as:

 _ **#introduc**_ _Conme in and say hi!_ (he contributed with HI and nothing else just to be an asshole)   
_**#theorybay**_ _WTF is up tho_  
 _ **#tatsy**_ _oh godf i lov estrawbrres dsdaaksj_  
 _ **#puke**_ _who puked so far_  
 _ **#dontpuke**_ _IMPORTANT: Eat slowly. Chew a lot._  
 _ **#food**_ _hide food where?_  
 _ **#holyshit**_ _THE LOAD GAPER SEATS ARE PADDED!!!!!!!_  
 _ **#home**_ _are we going home?_  
 _ **#game**_ _flappy bird: just do it_  
 _ **#quesion**_ _whatis chiper and why it on top of evreything_ (so far he'd figured out that it was a social media application that came pre-installed, had a character limit but not a post limit, and that by adding his trollian handle he'd signed into it. Okay?)   
_**#tasty**_ _who else ate the little yellow apples because they are delicious_  
 _ **#fruit**_ _check the little green fruit pieces JUST DO IT TRUST ME_  
 _ **#giantpillowthingie**_ _what's up with the giant padded pillow mound tho_  
 _ **#questions**_ _Going to talk to one of them. Send questions/requests_  
 _ **#thissymbol**_ _what's the tic-tac-toe symbol mean?_  
 _ **#fruitgame**_ _slice the fruit game highscores_




And finally— _finally—_ _ **#shiptour**_ _Leaving for the ship tour now, follow for updates_.

He followed _#shiptour_. Apparently following a tag meant he'd receive a copy of tagged posts on his main window, rather than entering a chatroom. Their latest _chirp_ was a picture of a tooth-paste dispenser; like everything else in the ship, it was unnecessarily bright and sleek. 

His incipient internal rant on the off-putting design of literally everything was derailed by the dulcet tones of a flute.

No, really.

* * *

Up until now he hadn't been paying attention to whatever was going on in the entertainment projector screen; he'd figured it would have been a classic movie such as "In which an unsuccessful tealblood movie scripterminator is wrapped into the delusions of a previously celebrated but since forgotten violetblooded actormentress, and in order to preserve his own life indulges her red advances as well as her belief in a great comeback movie which he's expected to script. Includes the whimsical decay of one pet screech-ape, no less than 50 accounts of delusions of grandeur, 45 unreciprocated red advances, 10 of which vacillated to black, the increasing girth of a celebrated director played in a fictional trolliverse, 20 accounts of illicit drug use, no less than 5 movies-within-a-movie, eight hundred deaths, thirty of which are of legislacerators, two exploded spaceships and widespread destruction of movie-making equipment". Intriguing but well-known, and hard to dislike. 

But when he looked at the screen he did not recognize what he saw, even though the flute melody felt familiar— vaguely but insistently so, like a buried memory. 

A woman walked through bright desert dunes, her jade-decorated clothes billowing around her. Everything was desaturated, except for the fluttering strip of scarlet silk she held. The song itself was unlike nearly everything he'd heard before, with lowblood instruments, plucked and hammered and blown into, as prominent as he'd never known them, and a percussion so soft he'd never heard its like even among the subdued slam arrangements that served as incidental music in movies; those were by design easy to gloss over around the action, and this was... not.

She started to sing. The words were familiar but not, like alternian heard from afar and then repeated—

"That's ancient Alternian," said Seadweller— Sorrel, quietly. Everyone was listening in silence.

This didn't seem to be a singing movie; there was no indication of plot, only the Jadeblood traversing the desert barefooted while singing in forgotten words to the dulcet melody of instruments weaving around each other— outdated, analog, classless, _compelling_ instruments that the aristocracy scoffed at, that were never recorded, recognized or released on an official capacity unless an established musicarver wanted to come across as edgy— the kind of instruments that children on Alternia would turn to for soothing and diversion, only to be expected to leave behind on ascension—

Her silks fluttered in the wind and sunlight shone through her veils without burning her. She let go of the scarlet shawl and it was carried, dancing in the air; when it fell to the sand, it morphed into uncountable scarlet butterflies in a display of special effects so seamless Karkat momentarily believed a scarf had genuinely turned into insects.

"Does this song sound familiar to anyone else?" he asked, hesitantly, when the song reached a quiet interlude.

Vague sounds of denial, shaking heads, a couple of shooshs; they were all enraptured by the weaving flight of a thousand butterflies against a gray sunset. His tablet vibrated briefly, but he paid it no heed either. Only a sudden awareness of the silence around him interrupted his own concentration; he turned to Twitchy with a start, only to find him as intent as everyone else in the block. Even the nibbled tablet lay forgotten in his still hands.

The rest of the video went on in much the same vein as before— the Jadeblood sang, made symbols with her fingers, waved her arms gracefully, and butterflies coalesced into animals, clothing and chains, and everything somehow matched the soothing pace of the song. Eventually it faded out, and a sigh spread through the block; shoulders slumped, backs stretched, and Bobbit churred in a tone that verged on disappointment.

"That was pretty awesome," someone said. 

"I wonder if I could play the flute like that?"

"What was the song about, though? The video was cool but made no sense—"

"A wanderer," Sorrel started, "sand. Illusions, voices, fire, heroes. That's about what I picked up, the rest was way past me." He raised an eyebrow at the dubious glances shot his way. "What? I _like_ ancient alternian, okay?"

"Shh!" said Grate-keeper. "It's a movie this time. Never seen it."

The screen had faded back into a block, even sleeker and shinier than anything in the ship, and Karkat averted his eyes with a sneer. He checked the tablet for whatever had made it vibrate; some Terlei Femura had sent him a private chirp.

_i had the flute solo on midi file. it was in huge batch of censored tunes i downloaded from restricted forum. maybe where you got it from?_




What? No, no, nonono.

_HOLY FUCKING SHIT, WHAT. FIRSTLY OBSCURE TUNES WERE NEVER CLOSE TO BEING AN INTEREST OF MINE, AND SECONDLY FUCK IF I WOULD DOWNLOAD ANYTHING_  
 _THAT CLAIMED TO INVOLVE A CENSORED ANYTHING WHATSOEVER. I MEAN DON'T GET ME WRONG, CENSORED MUSIC? THAT SOUNDS FUCKING AWESOME. BUT SHIT WAS_  
 _DANGEROUS ENOUGH FOR ME SO I BASICALLY DID MY DAMNEST TO NOT TRIP ON THIS SORT OF STUFF. KNOWING THAT I MIGHT HAVE AT SOME POINT IN SOME SIT_  
 _UATION I DON'T REMEMBER FILLS ME WITH RETROACTIVE DREAD. WHAT THE FUCK. IS THIS FOR REAL. THE WORD LIMIT WAS REALLY A THING. WHAT IS IT SUPP_  
 _OSED TO ACCOMPLISH? DJHKGFDFKFD_




Karkat put the tablet back down. Apparently this new movie opened with some sort of argument? He was about to dismiss it again when he noticed the argument was between a yellowblooded woman — her hair dyed with fancy golden stripes — and a rumpled, sheepish, sleazy-looking seadweller.

He glanced at Sorrel before he could help himself, but the kid seemed more fascinated than offended. 

He focused on the movie. The yellowblood was mercilessly lambasting the seadweller for being a lazy mooch; the latter was shamelessly playing up his patheticness, calling her things like "sugar cube" and "pink pearl" while asking for a thing called "boonbucks". In the background, three other trolls wore simple, cutesy uniforms like the yellowblood did, and exchanged knowing looks while fiddling with the hair and nails of a bunch of other trolls— each wearing satiny ablution robes colored from deep burgundy to violet. 

(Were the uniformed trolls hairdresservants? One of them had a purple sign. Were the robed ones their patrons? But that one was clearly rust. Was this the backstage of a movie set? Maybe these were all actors being modified for the screen. But everything looked so clean— no blood stains, no horn clamps, no claw-shaver, no skin-grafter, and all the scissors and filing blades and air pistols were small and delicate and polished into mirrors. No one seemed the least bit tense except for the arguing characters. You'd think there was no risk of a fatal scissor accident, even though every single hairdresservant-related scene he'd ever watched in media had ended with a neck sliced open, accidentally or on purpose, and they drove him to swear never to so much as walk by such an establishment if he ever made it to space where they existed in the first place.)

By the time Karkat was starting to wonder when the seadweller was going to flip out, the hairdresservants lined up and the movie unexpectedly turned into _another_ musical.

Stylistically speaking, the performance reminded him a lot of Troll Tchaikovsky's classical composition "All the Single Ladies"; the tempo was slower, but the instruments were similar and the influence on the beat and the dance moves was clear. The vocal performance had a markedly lowblood slant to it, with the four singers layering their voices in different notes and using the fanciful throat effects typical of those who couldn't afford or build instruments. 

The lyrics, however, were something else.

In Karkat's experience of romantic media, there were only three kinds of pale breakup songs: the "we have outgrown each other, let's be hatefriends" kind (attributed to highbloods), the "you're hurting me, boo-hoo, I'm cowering so hard, I can't keep up with your crazy badness" kind, and the "alas, I rapidly age, therefore I must shoo you into the arms of another while I secretly weep" kind (both attributed to lowbloods). 

He would have never expected a pale-breakup song, or a breakup song of any kind, to be best summarized as "I'm dumping you like a wet bag of limp horseshit because despite initial impressions that's exactly what you turned out to be". If he had, he would have never in a million years expected it to be presented as coming from a lowblood to a seadweller, of all castes.

But that was basically the entire video. The singers took turns accusing the violetblood of playing up his troubled highbloodedness for sympathy points, then turning around and dismissing his partner's problems and feelings; spoke of receiving lavish gifts only to find they'd been bought with their own hard-earned money; of being guilt-tripped into paying his debts while the violetblood did nothing to curb his dumbass impulses; and all the while the seadweller in question would wibble ineffectually, pout outrageously, and basically look like a hilariously pathetic douche. The actormentor was hamming it up for all it was worth, squeezing his face into the most wigglerish mask of thwarted entitlement and outright rolling on the polished floor in an impotent tantrum. He was either having loads of fun or under threat of death, but either way he was very convincing.

Meanwhile the robed customers looked down on him in choreographed dismissal, as contemptuously as if he'd publicly peed his pants. Nobody even seemed angry or outraged, just disgusted; the dude had clearly overstayed his welcome to such a degree that he wasn't even worth the expenditure of platonic hatred. It boggled the mind.

Karkat evaded a bid for his nose (Twitchy was apparently uninterested in erudite music) and sent a message of his own to Terlei.

_IS THIS ALSO A CENSORED TUNE?_




The answer didn't take long.

_chords i think. not actual chords but how notes put together. wouldn't trip automated criticanalysis program sweeping. familiar?_




Karkat thought about it for a while.

_NOT REALLY. JUST THOUGHT IT MIGHT EXPLAIN THE VIDEO._




It didn't. It should have never survived censorsnipping. It might have skid through if the hemocastes were reversed and all the glamorous customers were highbloods, but then the lyrics wouldn't have made sense— no highblood would suffer a useless lowblood so brazenly taking their generosity for granted, not unless the lowblood faked reciprocation so thoroughly and convincingly that the song wouldn't have had reason to exist. No, this was clearly a private recording of some sort. Probably a niche fetish.

Karkat ignored the ongoing music video for the moment, checking back on _#shiptour_. There was a whole slew of new pictures already, along with short descriptions. Many of them were of transportalizers and where they supposedly led to; Veshna's _transportalizers everywhere, way too many_ carried the implication that escape paths could be remotely cut off. But a new post popped up even as he scrolled— a picture of a heavy scarlet door marked with a stylized running bipedal, and the androgynous troll leaning into the shot while making a goofily surprised face. The description read:

_emergency door/stairs. if transportalizers out of order, -supposed- and -expected- to use this. emphasis not mine._




This entire ship and crew made _no fucking sense whatsoever_. They were prisoners treated as honored guests, with escape paths highlighted in mutant red, and watching subtly subversive videos of highbloods being _unsexily_ put down—

He glanced back at the screen, feeling almost as if he should double-check on the material and make sure he had it right, but the video had changed again; the screen focused on a dark curtain, and the high-class beat had been replaced by something incredibly somber.

Twitchy was apparently bored of music, and had draped himself over Karkat's torso to drool on his chest. But Karkat was now _very_ curious; one video had been pretty but unintelligible, the other downright subversive. What new surprise would this one bring to the meal platform?

A child's hand drew the curtain aside. A deep voice started going on about the End over sparse instruments. The camera slowly angled down to reveal a party going on far below, a dancing crowd following a colorful carnival float. 

Holy shit, they were cranking the symbolism on _high_. This was so his jam. He hugged Twitchy, to make sure he wouldn't fidget his way into blocking the screen, and settled back to be properly surprised.

The video apparently took place in a very old, decrepit hive; it focused on some children as they tried to make their way down several flights of precarious-looking stairs, presumably so they could join the party going on outside. Meanwhile the singer spoke of how he'd once wanted to face the Handmaiden head-on, but now wishes she'd stab him stealthily on the back so he could die unaware. 

This was weak so far. The Hive was life, the kids were trolls in general, and the party was heaven, natch. Songs from the point of view of a coward were very rare, but this singer didn't seem afraid of death so much as of dying slowly (maybe he _was_ in the process of dying slowly and wishing he wasn't?). At least the video itself was soft-grunge at its finest— the soot and squalor looked strangely harmonious in an aesthetically-arranged-grime kind of way, and the color of the children's scrawled symbols almost glowed amid the dark and desaturated surroundings. 

Where did they get these child actors from? Was this why they were rescued and treated in the first place? Were they going to be put to work as actors in this eccentric highblood's private subversive music videos? Was there even a market for this kinda thing in the fleet? It didn't seem that bad, but he supposed they wouldn't advertise the worst to potential servants. (Twitchy blew into his clothed chest, apparently an attempt at a raspberry. Were they so hard-up for child actors? But one sweep, they said. One sweep.)

The children interacted in snippets, some helping each other through the dangerous climb, others pushing competition off the myriad gaps in the railings, stabbing companions with splinters. There didn't seem to be any particular value judgement on either group of children, as they all looked equally bedraggled and desperate. And, he belatedly noticed, they were growing as they went down, both in size and in franticness; the atmosphere seemed redder, hotter.

Then a group of gangly near-adults reached the base floor only to find it was... on fire?

Karkat boggled. The song reached a crescendo as the characters ran through fire and smoke and falling debris, some dying in the process. Was this the fire of battle? The song must be really short then—

Abruptly the newly-adults broke out of the house, only to be grasped and separated by rough hands, and by then Karkat had no idea what was going on anymore.

Well, in a literal way he did; the young adults came out of the burning house into a nasty-looking crowd, and were separated even though some of them had been grasping desperately for each other. Some of the lowbloods were even chained as they were dragged away. A lone purpleblood was left untouched, frozen in shock on the spot. The chorus lowered in intensity, making the poor sod seem even more confused and alone, and the whole thing even more upsetting.

The interlude after the chorus was soft and crooning, creepy as the sooth-hum of a sick lusus in a horror movie; as it played the camera walked among the adult crowd, revealing it to be just as grimy, dark and bedraggled as the interior of the house, but instead of artful the dirt was gross and raw like an infected wound. What had looked like cheerful revelry from afar was revealed as bestial in-fighting from up close; and as they approached the colorful, swaying float, its base was shown to be effervescent with trolls clawing and climbing over each other to grasp its uneven walls.

The camera rose, focusing on each slimy, rusty, dark cranny of the parade float as it went. Gears and wheels were cranked non-stop by the starving trolls chained to them; the whole towering contraption teetered back and forth like a drunken coil, sometimes crushing unsuspecting climbers in its rusty layers, while others slipped on the blood and guts left behind by their unfortunate predecessors and fell to their deaths onto the squirming crowd below. 

When the camera reached the top, it followed a highblood around as they walked among gaudy piles of garbage, fraying velvet, peeling jewelry, tables of glistening food being peed on by partying peers, clusters of writhing naked trolls. The melody was quiet, the singing muffled, and the current character looked around at the scenario with glassy eyes, as if in the middle of a delirious dream. 

Just by watching the scene, Karkat felt as if he, too, was slipping into the same muffled, dreamlike stupor he had often occupied back in the cell. He followed the character in its vague meandering trek as it stepped over guts, limbs, overturned pails and embroidered jackets — until it stepped over the edge into the writhing abyss below, yanking Karkat straight out of his comforting haze just in time to focus on the spectacle of the other desperately climbing trolls.

Trolls pushed each other as they climbed, trolls pulled each other as they fell. A cerulean-blood stretched its hand to a faltering companion, only for _another_ cerulean to slice the latter's arm off its only handhold; the camera lingered on the falling troll, and then on the culprit as it turn a grin to its shocked caste-mate that was one-part smugness and two-parts seeking approval. 

On top, trolls clustered around the float's edge and dropped things — from blades to pails — as if making a game of humiliating and killing the climbers. A group of caped, snotty highbloods was gathered close to the opposing edge, striving to look as stuck-up as possible; a drunken-looking highblood grinned at one of them — a seadweller with a cloak that was nearly a canopy — and raised the small, child-like naked leg he was holding by the ankle in wordless offer (the rest of the body was offscreen, but it was a child, it was clearly a child—)

The seadweller dismissed the offer with a mild shake of his head — _nah thanks don't feel like it right now_ — then adjusted his magnificent cloak to cover a cord tied to his chair; following the cape as it draped over the edge revealed a long line of trolls crawling unders its cover, struggling up the precarious rope. 

And as the camera angled up to display the trolls as they nestled under the cape's crowded shadow, it revealed a looming dais crowning the float's top. 

It was leafed with peeling gold and glitter-glue, encrusted with jewelry and gaudy lamps, blinking in myriad lights in a display so tacky it had any circus troupe beat, and dancing on top of it was the Condesce. Not even a figure that might represent the Condesce if you were so inclined to interpret it that way: she had hair like the Condesce, matted with glitter and blood, was dressed in fuchsia skirts and jewelry, some impressively real and some obviously fake... and she was dancing non-stop, waving her trident around, sometimes swaying seductively and sometimes twirling and kicking as goofily as a cheerful child. 

She did not seem aware of the rot she was surrounded by, or of how precarious her perch was— every time her dais teetered on the edge of gravity, she just threw her head back and laughed.

The song returned to its bombastic, desperate crescendo; the Condesce kicked and turned, sliced trolls with her trident, tossed up clouds of glitter and cackled; and then the tune reached its somber end, and the camera panned back to encompass the whole macabre parade in all its hideous glory before fading to black.

The block burst into hurried voices, just like old times.

* * *

"That was _so... cool...!_ " said Yoaney, from his spot holding court amid a crowd of pillows and children. They all looked as excited and impressed as he was.

The older ones were just as impressed, but not nearly as pleased. Wide-eyed glances were exchanged, tablets were crumpled under the onslaught of furious tapping. Koumar raised both arms in a near-prayer and brought them down with emphatic weight to indicate the screen, expressing their collective sentiments in a single explosive question.

"Did we just watch a _thought-crime?!_ " his voice cracked with dismay.

"I knew it," said a bushy-haired girl in an awed whisper. Heads whipped toward her in surprise. Her lips opened in a faraway, beatific smile. "This is a _rebel ship!_ "

"Terlei?"

"Lelei, what the fuck?"

"So _cool!_ " interjected one of Yoaney's friends. 

"No, definitely!" she broke out of her dreamy trance to address the indignant room. "I knew it from the very first movie, but this one cinched it. All these songs used censored sequences and academy-rejected forms, and the imagery alone is enough—"

"Yeah, it's enough to screw us all!" Stumpy waved the prosthetic arm-base that covered his stump. It didn't have a hand for some reason, but he didn't seem the least bit bothered by that fact. "We all saw the thought-crime, and now you're telling us there was more of it than we knew at first? You think the legislacerators will give us a pass for not knowing it was censored in the first place?"

"Was that why they showed it, do you think?" asked the Precognitive Girl. "To tie us to the cause?"

"I don't feel the least bit tied," another teenager said, morosely. "Mostly a bit peeved."

Karkat just scrolled lazily through the ship-tour tag. Frankly, the reveal of this ship as a rebel craft just meant that shit finally made sense — the schizophrenic color assignments, the fact that they brushed his mutation off so easily, even the otherwise incomprehensible camaraderie he saw between trolls and aliens. This was a rich asshole's ship, yes, but the asshole in question was probably somewhere else acting like totally not a seditionary.

"This is probably the flagship," he said out-loud, to whoever might be paying attention.

To his luck, the one paying attention happened to be the already vociferous Stumpy.

"Oh yeah?" he spat, turning to Karkat with bared teeth. "And you probably know all there is to know about rebel scum, right, you freak?"

Karkat rolled his eyes as far back as they physically went. "No, you frothing ignoramus, I just applied some basic logic." He pointed his tablet at the fixtures around them. "Look at all this fancy shit. You think every rebel ship is going to hand state-of-the-art tech around to entertain every prisoner they come across?" He raised both arms towards a random corner of the room. "Did you fucking get a load of those ablution traps? And this fucking chair, check out this goddamn chair, it floats. I don't even feel a thrum, it just sits there on the air." He waved the tablet vaguely at the area under his recliner. "That's crazy shit. Think about everything you know about rebels— even assuming the movies paint them as significantly mangier than they actually are, the average rebel ship can't possibly have this much budget to go around. Therefore, this is a special ship, and it was built to impress." He raised an eyebrow at Stumpy and added, voice dripping with all the condescension he could muster. "Are you with me so far?"

Stumpy's answering sneer was downright cinematic. He started to stomp his way towards Karkat's chair, but was held back by the other remnants of the door vanguard; he halted in his tracks with visible effort.

"Easy for you to run your mouth about it," he spat, "when _your_ nasty mutant ass has nothing to lose by joining them—"

"Says the guy with one arm!" Karkat retorted, grinning with fake cheer.

"I never needed it!" He swept the prosthetic-stump-on-a-stump in an energetic motion, missing a kid's horn by inches. "I had enough skill to get on by!"

"Yeah, yeah, so I often told myself." Karkat conceded, with imperious dismissal. "Let's face it, neither you nor me would have made it past the drones. In fact I probably had a better chance, what with having all my limbs attached. I could just put on some tinted glasses and act like a complete douchefuck, maybe whip out some mediocre poetry, and I bet the drones would pass me by and hand me some obnoxious bling besides—"

"Yeah, like all the foundation in the world could cover those hideous facial stains!" he countered with a nasty grin. 

"What stains, you crazy fuck?" Karkat asked, and the grin faltered; clearly Stumpy did not expect this reaction. (Another teen behind him said an aborted "Er".)

"Are you visually impaired as well as— as— whatever's going on with your skin?" He asked, voice going embarrassingly high with surprise; he forced it down to compensate, sounding almost comically low-pitched as he continued. "Or could you not afford a mirror with whatever stipend mutants get?"

"My stipend fuckery aside, the hell are you even—" Karkat slapped his cheek in dismay. "These are _burns_ , you unrelenting _dumbass!_ "

"Those are not _burns!_ " Stumpy waved his one hand in indignation. 

"Yes they are," Sorrel piped up from the top of his water tank, sounding simultaneously bored and tired.

"No they're _not!_ " he insisted. "I know a burn when I see one!"

"No you don't, you stupid blathering neandertroll, or you'd know these!" Karkat spat, pointing furiously at his own face.

"Yeah?! _Yeah?!_ " Stumpy whipped his hand even more fiercely. "Where are the _boils_ , then?!"

"If I had boils you'd probably mistake them for warts!"

"Those are surface burns," said a very soft voice, and the room became silent entirely by force of habit. Soft Voice—- Bianka— rose from under a pile of pillows like a great ponderous beast from the deep, blinking sleep off her eyes; she turned to Stumpy, solemn as always, and added: "From sparks. I was there when he got them."

"Sorry we woke you up," said Karkat, quickly, out of respect and also the possibility that Stumpy might try to pin the blame entirely on him.

"Y—yeah," mumbled Stumpy, looking sheepish and a little lost before whirling back to Karkat. "Be that as it may!" He flapped his hand as if brushing the matter aside. "You can go and be all chummy with a bunch of suspicious traitors if you want to—"

"Traitors?" Bianka asked, rubbing an eye and looking around herself with renewed interest. "I assumed this was a private vessel."

"Hah, yeah!" Karkat agreed, "From some show-off highblood with caegars to burn, right? But they've got a lot of subversive media—"

"More like _censored_ media!" vociferated Stumpy. "The kind you get _killed_ for!" 

Behind him, the screen showed some dude's silhouette riding and doing simple stunts on a two-wheeled device, as calmly as if he could keep it up forever, against the backdrop of a rising alien planet. The beat was slow and lazy. The mellow singer said something about going home at the end of a busy night. No one had been paying enough attention to tell for sure, but it kind of sounded the opposite of dangerous.

"Not _that_ one!" he was quick to add when he noticed Bianka becoming absorbed by the screen. "You missed it when you were asleep, but we just watched something _bashing the Empress!_ "

"Oh," she said, quietly. "Too bad."

"Yeah, you were lucky!" he laughed. "You're saved from mind-probes. Might as well just go back to sleep and spare yourself further."

"I hate the Empress," she said, as softly and calmly as if Her Imperious Condescension were a fruit she didn't much feel like eating.

"Uh. Buh. Well!" he rallied. "You still shouldn't trust these traitors anyway. I doubt they're gonna feel this chummy about the Mutant when they find out about his blood—"

"But they already know!" Karkat interrupted, and by that point he was honestly mystified by Stumpy's attitude. Even the members of his little clique were watching him with a mix of pity and confusion.

"Yeah, Tirwin, they took samples from everyone!" one of them added. "Remember?"

He floundered, gaped and then hardened, all in the span of maybe a second. "Whatever!" he shouted. "Like they're going to accept a freak like you anyway, just wait until they show you your place—"

"Oh my flippin' _god_ will ya _shut your glubber?!_ " Sorrel smacked the wall of his tank, spattering Karkat and Twitchy in cold droplets. "You're the only one who gives a shit!"

"Nobody wants your opinion, you _fish!_ " He spat back.

Sorrel's hand blurred, and a handful of water smacked Stumpy's face like a slap; he stumbled back from the impact and dropped wide-eyed into his anxious friends' arms. 

"Now look here," Sorrel snarled, dropping his seadweller accent and paradoxically increasing in menace. "Either you give a shit about blood color, in which case you should _do as I say_ , or you don't give a shit about blood color, in which case you _shouldn't have started this in the first place_. You don't get to have your cake and eat it!"

Stumpy didn't answer. His hair hung limp and wet over his wide eyes, clung to his slack cheeks; he was the very picture of mortification, even for someone who'd just been bitchslapped by a handful of tank-water. His friends half-dragged, half-carried him away to the other side of the room, and he let them. 

Bianka placidly watched as the group walked past. "He didn't really mean any of that," she said, turning to Karkat.

Karkat considered it for a moment. "...yeah, I figure he just needed to scream and didn't know what at," he conceded, then scrunched his face in comical frustration. "Oh, whatever, I don't think he'd appreciate a forgiving head-pat this soon anyway. But you!" He pointed at Sorrel, who did a fair attempt at raising an inquisitive eyebrow. "You were pretty cool."

Sorrel gasped theatrically, braced both hands on the tank's border. "I was cool?" 

"Yes you were!" said Karkat, as cheerful as a Showdown Presenterferer announcing a prize.

"So you were," Bianka agreed, nodding primly.

"So I was!" Sorrel repeated, throwing his shoulders back and looking off into the distance as if he'd just learned of some great universal truth.

"Here's your complimentary fist-bump!" said Karkat, taking one of Twitchy's hands away from his mouth and bumping knuckle to sticky knuckle. Twitchy just looked at the touching hands vaguely. "C'mon, Twitchy, relay the bump!"

"Yo, kiddo!" Sorrel called from his tanking, stretching a fist down. "You're our only connection! You can do it!"

Twitchy looked up cluelessly at the new source of sound, considered it for a few seconds, and grinned around the sticky ball of his tablet. 

"Twitchy, you're letting us all down," chided Karkat.

"Oh, just go an' leave me hangin', why don't ya," Sorrel scoffed dramatically at Twitchy's insolent face, sinking back into his tank and making a big production of glubbing despondently.

Having thus amused the small group of children watching from the pile, Karkat busied himself with wiping spit off his knuckles. From the corner of his eyes he noticed Bianka approach slowly, eyeing Twitchy with speculative uncertainty not unlike Yoaney's.

"He... _seems_ better," she said, shyly.

"Hm," Karkat said, noncommittally, but then remembered her previous misgivings about Twitchy. "Oh— The mediculer said they tried to rig him up as a ship battery," he added, an offer to assuage a possibly guilty conscience. "But that he can recover in a sweep."

Bianka's eyes widened, and then narrowed in thought. "That..." she said slowly. "That _would_ explain..."

She eyed Twitchy with renewed interest. "I hadn't been picking up a conscious troll mind," she admitted. "But if he's got bioware installed..." she mumbled to herself. "Maybe the interference..."

"They said he's got neural clamps on," Karkat offered. 

She shrugged. "I don't know about any of that," she said. "I just know that he feels less... _muffled_." She sounded slightly uncertain about the last word.

Karkat just shrugged. He could make about as many assumptions about her senses as she could about battery rigging. 

Further conversation was interrupted by Widehorns leaning in over their heads, looking fretty. What was his name again? Rabufy-something. 

"What's your name again?" Karkat asked, before the teen had so much as drawn breath to speak.

"Radufe," he said, then flapped his hand with a grimace. "Never mind names, just check the profiles later. Everybody else's dropped the topic, but we were chewing on it over there and there's a few points we're really worried about— and having an open discussion without Zellie and Big Blue to keep it on track is probably impossible right now but—"

"Nah, I feel you," said Karkat. "Though I don't even fucking know what you're talking about. The movie?"

"Yes, the movie!" Radufe hissed. "It's just— no matter how you look at it, that was an insane production."

Karkat nodded, then turned to Bianka; she was watching with vague, clueless interest. "There was an actual mob of extras, like you have no idea," he told her. "And the takes, too— I think half the movie was just one big take?" He glanced at Radufe, who nodded. "From the ground, through a crowd, up a huge moving vehicle, through another set and then back down. It really was amazing. And there were so many extras dying throughout, it makes you wonder—" he paused as he caught up to his own line of thought. "Actually..." he wondered. "How the fuck would seditionaries even pay for the workforce involved? And all the dying actormentors—"

"That's the least of it," said Radufe, eyes wide and almost haunted. "Though yeah, just the fact that none of the dying actormentors even seemed to be trying to mess with the shots is... yeah. But it's the production itself." He pushed his hair back. "You seem to have a good head for logistics, but you're still thinking small. How do you hide a production this big from the Empire? The rebels might have access to an unoccupied planet with breathable atmosphere and nothing of interest to mine, they might be able to purchase the materials or the workforce or the building drones or the high-blooded slave actormentors without flagging the monetary system, they might be able to send them all to their suitable planet without the ship movement attracting attention, they might be able to complete filming with no conflicts before all that rigamarole catches anyone's eye, they might be able to dismantle the whole shit and then skedaddle before the inevitable spies report everything to the Legislaceratorial Division, but _what are the odds?_ Not to mention," he added, ruefully, with a nod to Karkat, "that the budget involved could probably pay for however many working warships instead."

"They might think propaganderrorism's worth it," Sorrel butted in from his tank. "The Government certainly doesn't spare anythin' when it comes to sellin' us a lifetime of service. Who's to say the rebels don't have the budget and the means? Who's to say they can't sneak all these purchases past the system, if they used the system at all— if they buy from pirates, or just smuggle that stuff their own selves— who's to say they can't do a whole lotta shit?"

"The Empire says it," said Karkat, "and... we only get their word for it, I guess." He glanced at Radufe, trying to untangle the complicated mix of feelings in his face, then at Bianka. She just gave him a blank look. Sorrel was tapping a beat on his tank wall, looking at them expectantly. Twitchy started playing invisible flutes again.

"It's really not about what they can or can't do, right?" He asked Radufe eventually. "But how screwed we are in either case."

Radufe's shoulders relaxed a bit, as if Karkat had passed some sort of test. "The mates weren't seeing it," he confessed. "Thought I was being paranoid. But a bunch of kids died in that movie, you know. For all we know we were their purchases from the start, and these guys just double-crossed the sellers in the end." He shrunk into his shoulders. "They all always thought I was a shoo-in for actormenting, because my horns look like Troll Will Smith's. But I never fancied dying in front of a bunch of recording eyes just to get some fucker to cry on their grubcorn..."

"That shit's all special effects," said Karkat, grasping one of Radufe's arms in a display of support. "Just think how many times Troll Will Smith died or lost a limb or cracked a horn in the Thresh Prince series alone!"

"It's easy to fake a death," added Bianka, with quiet but intense conviction. 

"See? They might throw away an extra, but not front-troll material." He patted the arm before letting go. "Of course, that still doesn't get any of us out of hot water. Let's hope they can't make any new movies anytime soon. Or hope we're all incredibly charismatic front-troll material, at least." 

"Yeah, I don't think so," said Radufe, morosely. "And even if there's nothing to act on, we're probably in for a life of forced work anyway, or death in a battlefield or whatever."

"New thing, same as the old, huh?" Sorrel offered him a rueful little grin. Radufe looked not the least bit cheered. 

Behind him, one of his "mates" stood from their huddle on the floor and approached the little group around the recliners. "Hey, Rad, check this out!" she said, showing him something on her tablet. Irritable Girl, Karkat recognized. "You can see the movie list on the media thingy! Here!"

Karkat sat up on his recliner with some effort — he felt as flattened as a pancake and heavy as lead — and tried to peek at whatever she had on her screen; Radufe lifted his own tablet to fiddle with, and she helpfully turned hers to him. 

"The media icon on the base screen, can you get there? This one—" she pointed. "It's got a list of all the movies available, and you can't even guess what we found in it."

Karkat followed the instructions, with Bianka leaning over his shoulder. He eventually made it to a list of movies, with thumbnails, names — very short and non-descriptive names, what the fuck — numbers after the names (GSY 22139? GSY 22145?), and what was possibly the name of the director, or, if they were all musicals snippets like the ones so far, the main singer or the troupe's name. 

He scrolled through the list, not really paying attention to its content, until he recognized a dark, desaturated thumbnail: _Lay my Blood at the Maiden's feet_ (GSY 22093, by Davide Bowwie).

"You can choose what to play next here!" She said, excitedly. "We were going to play the freaky movie again, but then we found _something else_."

She brazenly stuck her finger on Karkat's property, which he allowed because _eh_ , and scrolled down — and down and down — until she reached a similar thumbnail, now titled... _Making of_.

The small group trying to look into Karkat's and Radufe's tablets had roughly triplicated by this point. "We added it to the _Play Next_ list," she pointed to some other button on the app. "We can't bring it all the way to the top for some reason, so it's gonna play after the next one."

The news had certainly spread by this point; the hum of conversation had dimmed, and everyone seemed to have found a comfortable spot to ensconce themselves in. The crowd around Karkat parted like an opening flower; everyone found a pillow to squat on or a wall to lean against and, in one case, leaned obnoxiously against the back of his recliner. 

The current video ended with a group of dumb-looking trolls making silly faces and striking goofy poses with their instruments, like a troupe of failed comedians trying to produce laugher from a crowd of laughsassins. It thankfully faded to black, making way for a very colorful production starring a female troll in cutesy pastels.

Complaints immediately arose, and Radufe and his friends had to go around and explain that no, it was going to come after this one, that was always what they'd been saying all along from the beginning— but eventually the noise settled down, not so much thanks to their efforts as because of the movie itself.

The troll in pastels skipped and smiled over a background of colorful geometric forms; she was followed by a not-very-organized line of small children walking hand-in-hand, all of them looking excited— some near breathlessly so. The melody was circusy, but more cheerful than stately, and, like in the previous movies, lowblood instruments featured prominently; there was even clapping, the trashiest instrument in lowblood repertoire.

Then the kids surrounded her, and she raised a hand, singing, all smiles: _So how many fingers does this hand have?_

The kids jumped and skipped and answered— and the screen subtitled them in big fat colorful characters, to boot: _One, two, three, four, five!_

She raised her other hand and asked, passionately: _And if we count both, what do we get?_

The children rose to the occasion. _Six, seven, eight, nine, ten!_

Karkat didn't have time to bestow the inane video his scorn, even if he were to immediately recover from the sight of all those chubby, colorfully-dressed, flush-cheeked children. By his side, Twitchy had stilled completely; he was staring frozen at the screen, eyes wide, tablet-ball forgotten, and when the woman raised her hands, he raised his own along — awkwardly and stiff and not wholly under his control, but he did. When the numbers started being counted, he — with considerable lag — started mouthing along, babbling gibberish, rocking back and forth. 

Karkat turned from this sight back to the screen, taking in the sight of the singer and the incredibly convincing happiness in her shiny, scrunched purple eyes, and was filled with the kind of elation his warrior-cynical, battle-hardened, ferociously pessimistic heart only ever felt at the ending of a romcom. 

_How many toes have I got in this one foot?_ asked the one he was, at that moment, willing to proclaim as his personal toe-wiggling goddess. 

The children happily wiggled their colorful helium-sacs and answered her call: _One, two, three, four, five!_

_And if I were to add another one?_ she declaimed, eyes burning with mischief as she raised her other foot and, as she'd surely known all along, fell back on her ass and rolled exaggeratedly, feet in the air. 

This display did not stymie her followers in the least. _Six, seven, eight, nine, ten!_ They faithfully recited, bouncing on their toes. (Twitchy kept a foot aloft for nearly two seconds.)

Having thus determined her followers ready, the troll led her young retinue through their colorful, bouncing world; the forms around them grew in complexity as she bestowed further wisdom, surely representing the widening scope of their young minds.

_One plus one equals two_  
 _Two are the number of my sniffnodes!_  
 _When I add together all my friends_  
 _I can smell the friendship around us!_




Though she spoke poetry, she sung in the lowblood manner, using her throat like an instrument— a simple one, in her case, but still noticeably so. Her voice was joyful and young over the cheerful melody; the children danced and skipped around her. 

_Two minus one equals one_  
 _Being one can be calming sometimes!_  
 _But if loneliness comes around_  
 _You subtract it away by adding someone!_




She weaved among the children, took two by the hands to dance with; in front of the screen, the kids on the pillow-pile bounced on their seats to the beat, seeing themselves on a screen doing something other than messily dying for perhaps the first time in their short lives.

_Five times five is twenty-five_  
 _Nine times one is the same nine!_  
 _Every time we play together we do math_  
 _Multiplying our fun among us all_




Twitchy clapped. He was perhaps out of compass, and maybe his palms weren't joining at the right position to make a sound, and one could say that his fingers were getting in the way, but it certainly didn't stop him from pushing his hands against each other and working his lips soundlessly as if he could remember singing.

_Two divided by two is one_  
 _Five divided by Five, as well!_  
 _But sharing your happiness with everyone_  
 _Equals infinity-bajillion-one!_




The song— shifted— in some undefinable way, and Karkat's pump-biscuit seemed to move right along with it; the singer touched her chest with both hands, and he could tell the easy joy of the song was standing aside momentarily to allow for a moment of intense sincerity.

_Everyday I make_  
 _an account of my life_  
 _an account of all my dreams!_




The children joined her in a chorus:

_To make a better universe_  
 _We're counting, counting, counting on you!_  
 _And you are counting, counting, counting on me._  
 _We are all counting, counting, counting on you!_  
 _Counting together there's so much we can do._




The song looped back to the beginning. On the screen, children wrote single-digit numbers down with chalk and all due solemnity; in the block, the little ones made a game of raising their fingers as the numbers were called. Prosthetic-arm pointed to the screen while talking softly to her charge, the smallest kid in the room — who was perhaps not yet old enough to have started schoolfeeding — and Twitchy was rubbing fingertips together in a way that Karkat, after much squinching of his eyebrows, recognized as an attempt to snap fingers. 

The older ones alternated looking at the screen in bemusement, at the pile in bafflement, then at Twitchy in disbelief. Terlei had actual tears running down her face, and was mumbling about key shifts to a very dubious-looking neighbor. For a movie everyone had wanted to skip, it did cause quite a stir.

"Huh," Sorrel grunted, and scratched at a droplet running down his nose. "That'd be an okay movie to work on, I guess. Kinda twee. When's the next on?"

Karkat whirled around — teeth bared, fists clenched, and with full intent to defend his new idol — but before he opened his mouth, his brain caught up and pointed out that he was about to flip out over the artistic and healing merits of a propaganda video about basic math directed at trolls literally half his age, and that he was way too tired for that shit. 

Instead, he shifted the rest of the way around and fussed randomly at Twitchy's collar. Yes. Nobody noticed. Vantas, you are a smooth bastard.

He was a bit sorry when the song faded out — even putting Twitchy's reaction aside, it _had_ lifted his mood — but his bloodpusher still sped up in excitement when the dark curtain covered the screen again. How many extras had been bought? How many had died? How many takes had to be scrapped before the condemned extras were broken enough to stop spoiling shots? How ludicrous an amount of caegars had been spent on it? As the words "Making of" faded into view, Karkat settled back in full expectation of a major bragfest extolling the movie's epic proportions.

Then the lighting over the curtain changed, became flat instead of dramatic. As the childish hand pushed it slowly aside, both fabric and skin became rubbery, smooth, then colorless, and finally turned into a weird web of lines.

The movie that followed was... informative, in a way. They were shown a room papered in myriad drawings and occupied by casually-dressed trolls, who nodded and waved at a collection of earthen busts as if in deep discussion. There was a screen recording of some unknown software, showing a three-dimensional model of the forlorn highblood from the hive-escape scene.

Karkat saw that model and his brain immediately went. No. Nope. No fucking way. You're shitting me. Absolutely not.

But so the video went— the careful sculpting and coloring of open sores on some background character's virtual skin, to be displayed later for all of half a second during one of numerous wide pans; the camera's path through the throng of textureless dolls on a smooth blank expanse; a miniature float rolling its clunky way over a table, carefully watched from several angles by a rustblood; the computerized face of a young troll growing into adulthood at the click of a cursor; the delicate sculpting of a seadweller's fins— Karkat had the wild impression that he looked kinda like Sorrel...

The initial curtain pull, displayed from a different angle and revealing a patch of wall floating on nothingness and a kid wearing an absurd set of clothes — a weird fluffy plateau for a skirt, huge armored boots, shoulder pauldrons bigger than their head and a flag on their back reading "GUD LAK U PUR FAK" — standing on a pile of highblood character models, Condesce included, lying stiff and vacant with their arms open wide like so many giant dolls. 

A huge, richly embroidered violet cloak, draped over a collection of chairs and scrutinized by a bunch of trolls, who then crawled underneath it like a bunch of wigglers and waved cheerfully at the camera. 

A dismembered arm streaked in bright unrealistic blue, and the change in ambient lighting that made the color look normal while everything else turned drab.

A brown-skinned alien in a flight-suit, dancing seductively on a wobbly platform until she almost tripped on her enormous wig, laughed, then started a goofy jig.

The Condesce's model, repeating her movements on a corner of the screen.

There was some commentary, but Karkat didn't pay much attention to it. In fact, halfway through the movie he was barely even paying attention to his surroundings anymore. 

So... everything — the medicullery implements, the floating recliner, the fancy ablution traps, the screen, the movie — wasn't merely fleet-grade technology. It was rebel technology, and their main bragging point. They had enough computer power to basically build a movie on a game engine, if he had it right, and make the characters indistinguishable from actual people in shape and movement. And they could spare enough of it to use on a propaganda piece. 

No one had died in the making of that movie. No one had actually _actormented_ in it.

A tension he hadn't been aware of bled out of his achy muscles. He closed his eyes and sighed, hearing Twitchy's vaguely musical babbling on one ear and the movie's lyric-less background track on the other. By the time the movie ended — fading out without any record-breakage announcement or accomplishment fanfare — he'd already slipped into unconsciousness without even meaning to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> List of songs I used as inspiration for the music videos:
> 
>   * [Toki no Hourousha](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RJQ-8Yu2eE) \- Nobuo Uematsu and Risa Ohki
>   * [Bills Bills Bills](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiF6-0UTqtc) \- Destiny's Child
>   * [Bring me the Disco King](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2gMMZB0FaU) \- David Bowie
>   * [Conte Comigo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpff3x_1pEA) \- Xuxa Meneguel
> 

> 
> And here's a [blog post](http://elanorpam.tumblr.com/post/83260672557/so-hey-goldenverse-is-amazing-thought-i-should) talking about three of the songs above and a bit about what the troll-made versions would be like.


	4. Excelsis Day

It felt like waking up from a long, vague dream; in a way it was almost like waking up for the first time ever.

Karkat opened his eyes and knew exactly where he was and what had happened — he knew it perhaps even better than he had back when he'd first experienced the being and the happening. His mind was crystal-clear and his memory was steel-sharp. 

The ceiling before his eyes was off-white and softly textured, tactile though he had never touched it. The lights were dimmed, but a bright column fell in from the block's entrance, and the screen played a looping video of a particularly scenic river, complete with the sound of windblown greenery. The block was domed, he noticed for the first time; he could feel air currents brushing his face, sense his thick robe weighting on his skin, hear the soft breathing and quiet murmurs of his companions. 

This sense of comfort and well-being was incredibly disorienting.

He sat up slowly, pushing himself up with both arms. His muscles ached, true, but more like a stretch after long disuse than the generalized pain from... before. There was no dizziness, no heavy weakness. If he were back— if he'd been— it could have been any lazy evening after sleeping off an extended training workout. 

He started stretching his arms in earnest, and concentrated on the action perhaps more than was needed. Tendons, yes. Muscles, yes. Deep breath. A good, entirely physical kind of pain. 

He was about to stretch his legs when he remembered his foot.

Someone had covered his and Twitchy's legs with a blanket at some point, a thick-looking stretch of striped fabric in grey and near-rust. (His mind shied away from the memory of the previous blanket — or rather the situation in which that blanket had figured — but he still felt relieved at its absence.) He glanced at Twitchy, who looked relaxed and... normal in sleep, and thus reassured he finally tugged the blanket aside.

His good foot looked as always, perhaps a little bonier than usual. The other one still had the thick toeless sock on, now somewhat stained. At least the toes were back to a normal size, with no trace of swelling left — did they look a little bit wrinkly, or was it just him? 

He tentatively moved his big toe; it tugged at stiff skin and tendon, but did not hurt. Heartened, he wiggled his toes a little more vigorously. There was a small twinge of complaint from somewhere around his ankle, easily ignored, and even that gradually diminished as he went on. He stretched both knees as far as he could make them, which wasn't much, then finally slid down the side of his seat and planted both soles against the floor.

It didn't hurt.

He took a couple of experimental steps. The support sock was thick enough that it turned his gait into a half-limp. He thought he could feel something at that particular joint, a warning pressure when he put his weight on his ankle, but for all practical purposes nothing was amiss other than his own lingering weakness. 

He had the strangest urge to laugh. God, to be so excited by something so small! It was pathetic, and he couldn't care less. He might have laughed aloud — definitely a laugh and not at all a giggle — but then he noticed that most everyone was asleep, and hastily cut himself off.

He could see Zellie sprawled face-down on the pillow-pile, which had swollen to nearly three times its size. It was now mostly comprised of children and the ship-touring party. Most of the other adolescents had taken over the strange shelves on the wall. Even Sorrel was asleep in the water, ensconced under a strange conch-like object that had been for some reason taking space inside his tank.

Then he spotted a fruit bowl, and his examination of the ambient was interrupted by a sudden reminder that he was _starving._

The fruits were objectively delicious, though what with snarfing them all down nearly simultaneously he couldn't exactly tell what tasted like what. The artful arrangement of colorful slices was down to its dregs by the time reason overcame instinct (helped by a strong burst of pineapple-berry-bile burping up his chute); he waddled back to his corner, intent on staving off the impending regret by means of intense tablet browsing.

A cursory examination revealed that his tablet had slipped through a gap between the two benches during his sleep. He tried moving the floating apparatuses out of the way; they glided smoothly with the least pressure, attached to each other as they were, and stopped as soon as he stopped pushing. Twitchy showed no signs of noticing the movement.

Then Karkat bent his knees, and halfway down everything just stopped going.

He was momentarily stuck with his ass suspended, wondering at the tautness of his thigh muscles — it felt like trying to stretch a cloth with no give — and then fell back on his ass. He hadn't much stretched his legs, he remembered, and the recliner kept them well suspended, but he'd assumed everything was in order, because everything had _felt_ in order. For a second he entertained the thought that their new hosts had planted this strange limitation, but dismissed it just as soon; if they wanted to keep a troll from running away, there were plenty of ways to do so that didn't make them completely useless for cleaning under a damn desk. 

He retrieved his tablet, and settled back right there on the floor. 

# _ship-tour_ had been busy, with nearly five hundred unread chirps. The tail-end of it had many pictures of the ship's bridge, a surprisingly spacious room with a surprising dearth of button-covered consoles, and a good length of wall displaying some crazy psychedelic screensaver. The personnel in the pictures — a mix of trolls and aliens — had both red and green details on their uniforms, and some more scrolling revealed that the colors actually denoted function rather than caste, which simultaneously made all the sense and none of it. 

There were no pictures of the commander, who was, according to a green-marked technician, holed in his office browbeating his superiors in a remote conference. The red-marked second-in-command was the white-haired, sawed-horns tealblood troll who'd first retrieved them; he smiled winningly for all the pictures like a displaced modelarcener and gamely fielded nearly five screens worth of questions, most of them about himself. No, his hair was not a mutation. It used to be black like everyone else's. He sawed his horns off near to the root in order to infiltrate an imperial ship, which in hindsight he could have easily done without any sawing. It was a nasty old story, he'd been in a bad frame of mind at the time. He wrote a book about his life, maybe they could read it some day. Parts of it were written in alienese, though. A bunch of reasons, but mostly because he thought it was cool. They even made a movie. It was a very good movie, the actor who played his role did an amazing job. No, they couldn't watch it right then, the movie wasn't available on the ship's intranet. The movie also had important dialogue in alienese and they'd need subtitles. Because there were a lot of alien characters. Everyone in the ship spoke at least three alien languages. Because their species constantly dealt with each other. They'd learn eventually, but they could think about that later. No, it wasn't hard. Carapacian was easiest to talk with but hardest to write. Others depended on the person. He loved speaking in Skaian, but that dude over there still mistook subjunctive-future-past-imperfect declensions for objective-future-present-perfect declensions (picture of charming, innocent smile). The captain was a headstrong troll of firm priorities and fast albeit sometimes questionable decisions, and would be available for more in-depth explanations once he was done steamrolling a mob of incredibly powerful people.

Scrolling further back, Karkat eventually came across a picture of Indigo's moirail. To his surprise, she was smiling; her eyes were puffy and orange-streaked and her face was wan and stained with rusty tears, but she seemed almost cheerful. She was dressed and clearly bathed, and had been talking animatedly at the camera's general direction, the mug in her hand captured mid-sloshing. Her newly-made profile introduced her as Cynael Wullan, and according to the chirps before and after, her moirail was somehow, almost miraculously, still alive.

There were also pictures of a big window, beyond which orange-shrouded figures huddled around a slightly blue-stained platform. Cynael had described the damage: second and third-degree burns, broken ribs, collapsed lung, severe internal bleeding. Expected to be back on his feet in two weeks. He sent her a quick private chirp in twelve parts about how even Twitchy was looking good so Indigo was sure to be fine in no time, and about how the big dude was a pretty cool guy who deserved better besides, and moved on.

The previous pictures weren't all that interesting, with a significant exception. Clean corridors; a pristine food-preparation block with lots of pictures of the stove for some reason; a quick and perfunctory glance at the crew's quarters (also very clean and organized, but with no recuperacoons in sight); ablution blocks and load gapers, all much too hygienic to be entirely true. 

The significant exception was a huge circular block with a thick center pillar and surrounded by walkways. The ship-touring party didn't actually get to enter the block; instead, they photographed from the fenestrated walls that surrounded it, circling around and registering every machinery bump and metal ladder and focusing on every blinking led and every display panel of the LED-striped and button-covered pillar. After all, their guide claimed there was a miniature black-hole caged inside that pillar, one of the three that, according to them, provided energy for the entire vessel _in lieu of an actual helmstroll_. 

Karkat just shook his head in silent disbelief and went on scrolling. 

Other than the ship-touring, the digital side of their conversations had been uneventful. Most of it involved some yellowblood called Dandol Binion whining about a video that vanished from the list before it was played. (The thumbnail for which, according to his impassioned descriptions, involved an iron guitar that was simultaneously in chains and on fire. Sounded completely inane.) The other videos, at least the ones that were commented upon, had been apparently comprised of mild scenery and mild sounds, and nothing like the criminal video was mentioned at all. 

By that point, Karkat was progressively losing interest in his fellow children's shenanigans and growing increasingly more engrossed by the complaints coming from his tummy. 

He tossed his tablet on the recliner and clung to it, pushed up with his malfunctioning legs. The recliners went _clong_ against Sorrel's tank, but in the process he managed to scramble to his feet, and then trip his way past a still sleeping fishy asshole to hug the wall and wonder: where _were_ the load gapers? They were padded therefore they existed, but where—

"Hi," said a small shy voice from somewhere around the floor, and Karkat glanced down at the tiniest troll; he was approaching with small mincing steps and the awkward air of someone who is unsure and afraid but will do their _damn_ best to make friendship come out of this.

"Hi," he croaked. Deep breaths. Things were piping down in his foodsack. Maybe he could still handle this. Maybe all those delicious fruits wouldn't have to go to waste.

"I'm Calmon," said the child, twisting his little hands together and looking into his face with breathless anticipation.

"I'm Karkat," he said, before hunching against the wall and hurling magnificently. 

Calmon looked placidly at the resulting mess, then back at Karkat. "Did you puke?" he asked, tugging on a finger.

Karkat thought about that one for a moment. 

"No," he croaked, eventually. "This is just the physical manifestation of my vitriol, which I spew out like an acid-dragon when words fail me."

"Oh," Calmon stared a little harder at the little chunky puddle at Karkat's feet, cocked his head, and apparently decided in the privacy of his mind that no, it really was puke, and his new friend was just doing a Funny. "It's okay," he said. "Happens is going to come and clean it in no time."

"Who?" Karkat mumbled, blinking watery eyes at the puddle of sick. Some of it had spattered the wall. He wondered if he was going to get in trouble for it.

"A little plate that comes to lick the dirt," Calmon explained, helpfully, or unhelpfully as the case might be. 

But Karkat was spared the trouble of requesting elaboration, as, right on cue, a squatty black disk slid soundlessly from under Sorrel's tank. It beeped a few quiet beeps as it approached, and blinked festive little lights around its circumference; on its smooth surface shone the reassuring message of "It Happens".

It maneuvered around Karkat's feet and crawled over the puddle, leaving a trail of smooth clean floor in its wake.

"Oh, it's Happens," mumbled some other kid, peeking sleepily from her spot on the pillow pile. It was like a sign; several other tousled heads perked up in attention, and their owners soon rose up and stumbled blearily toward the disk like a horde of small wonky-haired zombies, gathering around the vomit to watch it disappear with many wondering oohs and aahs.

Unmoved by the spectacle, Karkat poked the nearest brat on the ribs, a guy around Bianka's age with a scar on his nose. "Where's the load gaper?" he asked, when the kid finally diverted his attention from the floor.

"Bit late for that, don't you think?" the kid retorted, going right back to his strange pastime.

Perhaps, but Karkat was undaunted by facts. "Fine, then," he said, acidly. "Just stand still while I piss in your auriculars."

"Aff!" The brat rolled his eyes. "Okay, okay..." 

He took Karkat by the elbow and led him to a side door, which he presented with an exaggerated bow; Karkat would have responded in kind, if the sudden flood of spittle in his mouth hadn't sent him packing inside.

There was another line of doors inside; he stumbled blindly into the nearest one, and thank fuck, there really was a load gaper. He spat the gross saliva out and waited for the clutch in his throat to fulfill its promise, but instead the nausea started to subside.

He took in his surroundings as he waited his foodsack out. It was a sparsely furnished cubicle, its walls bright and textured and framed. The load gaper was marble-white and, yes, padded (and the padding could apparently be flipped back, for whatever fancy rebel reason), and a miniature rainmaker and tissue dispenser hung within easy reach of the seat. 

Karkat generally prized himself in being a rugged, no-nonsense troll who had no time for useless frills, but he felt himself forced to agree, on a purely intellectual level of course, that this arrangement of shapes and shades was pleasing and elegant in its simplicity, fancy without being ostentatious, and he'd totally arrange something like that in his— 

He spat a last gob of thick spittle into the load gaper. The slime inside was a light, transparent bluish green, halfway between teal and jade, and he entertained a moment of smug vindication before remembering how easy it was for any dumb wiggler to dilute bio-degrading slime without changing its appearance— and not only was it the wrong shade, it also smelled like the good kind of mint-drops instead of decaying sopor. This was probably a space-sanctioned substitute for gaperslime. 

He thoughtfully watched his pink spit seep into the vaguely gelatinous substance, and trickling down through openings caused by whatever chemical reactions allowed liquids to not just hang around on top causing a literal stink, and, satisfied by what he saw, hiked his robes up, his underwear down, and sat heavily.

It was _hella padded_. 

Once that particular business was finished and his nethers were washed and daubed dry with frigging scented tissues, he stepped out of the cubicle and finally explored the rest of the block. The other doors also led to load-gaper cubicles, one of which also contained a couple of giggling six-sweep-olds crouched on a corner and carving juvenile doodles on the cubicle separators with carefully applied psionics. The wall opposite the cubicles was lined with washing basins and covered in a single wide mirror, which almost impressed Karkat more than the ablution traps had — possibly because he was more conscious.

He squinted at his reflection. His hair was a big fluffy mess, snarled and wide and covering his horns nearly up to the yellow, but his face seemed... okay. Thin, but okay. 

He remembered the burn marks with a jolt. Somehow in his distracted haze his brain had completely ignored their existence. Still, where they'd been dark in his profile picture, they were now almost halfway faded— more like a diluted ink wash on his skin than like a conglomeration of sizzle marks. Still very noticeable (unless you were a dazed moron), but...

He touched his burnt cheek. Softly, at first, but then with more decisive pokes. It was barely coarse, didn't even hurt.

He was still considering the ramifications of that discovery as he waddled his way back into their main block. The kids had scattered, some now engaged in the process of waking the sleeping via production of noise, and both Happens and the thing that happened were gone with only a clean patch of floor left behind.

The alien assistant docterrorist from the previous day was also there, standing by his recliner and acknowledging Bobbit's prosthetic claw with a cheerful smile and tablet in hand. Karkat slowed his gait, warring against the strange and conflicting impulses to both run up to her and shrink on the spot— a bizarre instinct insisting she was safe when his conscious mind knew better.

"Well, look who's already up and about!" she said, when he finally accepted the inevitable and limped closer. "I'm Aleya, remember me? Looks like you didn't have your tablet at hand for the notice, but I'm here to change your splint and give you your second round of immunization. Can you sit down?" He perched back on his recliner, feeling awkward. "How is your ankle?" She asked, kneeling down to tug at the wrap. "Feeling any pain?" Karkat shook his head. "Throbbing, pounding?" She set the heavy fabric aside. "A weird scraping when you walk?" The corners of her lips twitched up at the face he made.

She looked at his foot through her tablet, attentively, sometimes asking him to make movements— flex foot a little, try to stretch it, spread the toes apart. She wiped at it with a warm towel, touched the skin with small implements.

"It's recovering nicely," she said finally, "but still fragile. The tendons are still inflamed, and the crushed blood vessels haven't fully rebuilt yet. It'll only take half a day-cycle for the regenanites to finish their job, but until then you should take it easy on this foot, okay? I'll be wrapping it on a new splint— it's thinner, don't worry," she pulled the fabric out of nowhere, turning it this way and that, "and give you an extra dose of painkiller. Try not to put much weight on it— I know it feels fine, and walking to and from the gaper should be fine, but any longer distance will stress the new tissue. Understand?"

Karkat nodded dumbly. Don't walk unless going to the load gaper. Got it.

She wrapped his foot again — in a much thinner sock this time, thankfully —, touched a weird pump-tub to the spot under his knee, discarded it, and unpeeled his sleeve to touch his arm with another. Karkat watched the ministrations dubiously, tried to rub the chill off his shoulder once she put the sleeve back in place; the whole process was so quick and uneventful it felt incredibly pointless.

She completed her visit by decaptchaloguing a cart full of mugs and handing them around to whoever seemed awake enough. He accepted his with reasonable grace, and sniffed at the drinking slit on the lid; it smelled dizzyingly like the best soup ever. His foodsack made the internal organ's equivalent of grabby hands. 

The soup's power was such that even assholes draped on high shelves on the opposite side of the room were raising their heads and squinting around as if instinctually aware of its presence. The pile of pillows and limbs slowly dismantled itself as its members reached out, groaning, for the cart, and from the way Zellie pushed herself up, you'd think she'd forcibly dug her way out of unconsciousness through sheer strength of will. 

Karkat was still basking on the feeling of being warmed from the inside out when his previously forgotten tablet shivered under his ass. He fished it up languidly, vague curiosity warring with — or rather just sort of conking against — the desire to lie back down and sleep some more. Hey, look, it was one of them notices! First one he actually saw.

_Commander Auriga Keelus sends immediate summons to the Main Bridge Auditorium for Q &A session regarding current and future living arrangements._

It was a testament to the soup's quality that it didn't immediately curdle in his stomach. 

The block's atmosphere instantly soured. Teenagers glowered at their tablets as they sipped from their mugs, children audibly wailed; a four-sweep old, bless her impulsive and inconsequential little soul, actually ran up to the (vaguely confused) Aleya and flapped the tablet at her, indignantly.

"They _can't_ interrogate us!" she cried, furious. "We were kidnapped and thrown in the brig and didn't see nothing! We were locked in there the whole time and we don't know nothing!" 

"What?" the alien blurted out, leaning down to peek at the tablet. The girl straightened the crumpled surface and displayed it with grim satisfaction, wiggler-fat cheeks dimpled with the tightness of her lips.

"Go and tell your highblood that he's _wasting his time!_ " she said, raising her chin imperiously.

Aleya stared at the notice for half a second, then palmed her face with great solemnity and feeling. She mumbled under her breath — Karkat was pretty sure he caught the word "dropkick" among her mutterings — but when she lowered her hand her face had turned back into a display of serene cheer.

"What's your name?" she asked the girl, crouching down to her eye level.

Her tiny pigeon chest inflated with pride. "Antara Mielos," she proclaimed, face schooled into a mask of dignified constipation.

"Miss Mielos," said Aleya, "do you have power over your current living arrangements?"

Antara Mielos' dignifiedly constipated face did not budge.

"That is, are you responsible for this ship, and the food you're going to eat on your next meal, and where you're going to sleep?"

"Oh," Antara's façade shifted into one of cluelessness, and she touched a finger to her lips with a frown.

"See," the alien continued, with a tone of infinite patience, "what the Commander _means_ is that he's got some free time now, so he's inviting everyone to go ask him what the fuck, and he'll answer you all personally because he doesn't know how to delegate."

Antara definitely had a look of embarrassment on her face now. But the alien laid a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, squeezed it, offered a smile.

"Your misunderstanding is not your fault," she said. "Notices are supposed to be clear and concise, and this one was not." She rose to her feet, set her shoulders back in dignified professionalism. "I formally apologize on behalf of the commander for this crappy wording choice."

Antara took a deep breath. "Apology accepted," she said, solemn.

"Well, then!" the alien turned to the rest of the room. "Since I'm already here, shall I guide you to the Auditorium?"

And so she proceeded to herd a crowd of mostly subdued children out of their nests, politely ignoring the generalized skittishness of the group. Several of them she talked into using some sort of floating mobility apparatus, and when Karkat made to step off his in a fit of forgetfulness she very pointedly offered to push his conjoined recliners. 

They shuffled barefeet down corridors, torn between looking around in curiosity and acting like they knew how to behave professionally in a ship; stepped onto a humongously wide transportalizer, which fit not only their entire group but also the four or five extra uniformed aliens who'd very coincidentally joined them at some point; were led to a wide door and into a luxurious miniature gladiatorial arena, complete with layered seating arrangements.

There was a bar counter in the middle of the arena, and some dude eating an unassuming meal.

It took Karkat a moment to really understand what he was looking at. The bar counter was heavily polished, white with lavender wood details, and embossed with a couple of complicated sigils in silver; not a bar counter then, so much as an official speechifying plateau like in the old movies. What he took for an arena was therefore a Conferemonstrating Podium, which, instead of rising above the spectators for maximum intimidation, was positioned below them for maximum visibility. It was the arrangement of a gladiatorial arena, but for boring purposes. 

That this guy was eating at what was clearly an expensive conferemonstrating platform with particular symbolic value implied a certain disregard for authority, which was how Karkat knew straight away that he was the biggest authority in the ship. 

At least it was only a half-empty plate and a mug. The implicit message it gave was one Karkat could get behind. A big, sumptuous meal on that table would imply a much more unpleasant brand of assholishness. 

As they were herded to the seats closest to the front — and as seats were outright removed to make way for the several recliners (as well as Bobbit's basket— who the hell even brought the thing along, it didn't even know language, it just chirped plaintively at people until they praised his new leg) — the commander raised his plate and shovelled the dregs of his meal in, then set it aside with no apparent sign of self-consciousness. The look in his face was that of a busy badass who had no time or care for ceremony when there was shit to be done. 

Behind the amber lenses, his eyes were narrow and considering as he watched the stragglers stumble their way to their seats; his curved, pronged horns leaned down as he sipped from his mug—

His pronged horns were not pronged. Like a pair of cells stuck halfway through mitosis, his horns were fused at the root and grown into bifurcated points.

Behind his amber lenses, his narrowed eyes were of indistinguishable shade.

The shuffle slowly died into silence. The commander set his mug aside, ran his eyes over the few occupied rows in front of him, and finally stood up; his uniform was adorned with scarlet, but the sign at his chest, now clearly visible, was yellow on black.

"I am Commander Auriga Keelus, captain of the vessel _Singularity_ , acting under the authority of the Galactic Militia and the laws of the United Galaxies," he announced. "These words probably mean nothing to you. I hope to rectify this fact during our upcoming conversation." 

He started to circle around the counter, arms crossed at his back. 

"I understand that my summon was cause for some distress," he said, his voice as loud as expected of someone who must make himself heard over constant action. "Not just for you, but also for members of my crew. Before we start, I thought I'd clarify the reasons I called you here, and why I'll probably be shouted at for this. It should give you some context for your current situation."

Now in front of the counter, he leaned against it, crossed his arms. Cocked his head at the children.

"There is a protocol as to how we're supposed to handle and interact with rescuees," he said. "And by rescuees we mean you. Children. Yes, this does mean we pick up kids like you on a somewhat regular basis. In fact, we're trained for it. This ship's main function is to track down pirates and rescue any child they may have kidnapped. _However_."

He let the word hang in the air. Behind and above him, a glass railing separated the conferemonstrating block from some other ambient; the white-haired troll was leaning on it, looking down at their group with watchful intent badly disguised as vague curiosity.

"However," the commander repeated, resuming his slow walk around the platform, "the average number of successful smuggling raids, per sweep, is _three_. The average number of kidnapped children, per successful raid, is a little more than _one_. That means, in practical terms, that for every ship we capture there's usually one kid, sometimes two, very rarely three. There was once four, and it was a big deal." He stopped and faced the children, his face stony. "In other words, _there is no protocol for handling forty children_."

Karkat felt himself clutching Twitchy's hand. He had no idea when he'd first grabbed it.

"On the other hand," he said, subtly more relaxed, "such rescuees are, in over ninety-percent of the cases, catatonic or responsive only to psychically-implanted commands. Most of the protocol involves coaxing the victims out of their catatonia, undoing mentalist programmation, and, by and large, making sure they're not spooked back into unresponsiveness. But," his mouth twisted in a bitter grin, "your group is in a remarkably healthy state — in comparison with the usual — since their crew's only mentalist apparently died in the initial raid. In other words, most of you are capable of understanding words and expressing discomfort."

He made it back to the table, leaned on it again.

"In view of _that_ , I concluded that you don't need tiptoeing around. I even managed to convince the people I answer to, and some I don't, that you are capable of handling the facts." He paused, gauged their tense, silent faces. "The facts are that this ship and this crew are not equipped to give you the quality of care that you need for the requisite forty nights of medical quarantine." 

There was no reaction other than a deeper silence, but he raised a quelling hand anyway. "These forty nights were supposed to slowly acclimate you to the cultural differences you'll be dealing with," he said. "Instead, we're shooting straight for a fully equipped planet-bound hospital, while I give you a crash-course on what to expect once we arrive. I'll start with an overview, and then I'll answer whatever questions you may ask. Understood?"

There was some staggered, hesitant nodding. He nodded back.

"Good. First of all, you are not in Alternian territory anymore. We crossed the Empire's outermost boundaries nearly eight hours ago."

He scrutinized their blank faces intently.

"Secondly— we can't approach Alternia, and we can't contact it. We can't take you back. I'm sorry."

* * *

Karkat had never once thought about going back. He had never so much as considered the possibility of going back, assuming straight away that it would never happen. Yet, hearing it from the mouth of this— this _adult_ — made it too real, too inescapable to deal with. He was infuriated for two seconds, and then despair caught up; trying not to sniffle too loudly soon occupied most of his attention, and had he any to spare he’d know he was hardly the only one struggling to come to grips with the trunkbeast in the block.

But he was spared from wallowing in depression by a timely application of elbow to the face. Twitchy was finally awake, and was scrabbling at his hair as if shaking off an imaginary spider. 

"There's nothing there," Karkat mumbled, batting at Twitchy's arm as feebly as Twitchy was batting at his own head. "Stop—"

Twitchy froze at the sound of his voice, turned to stare cross-eyed at Karkat's face. He blinked, slowly and continuously, his eyes unfocused; he seemed amazed and mystified and somewhat punch-drunk by something three inches from Karkat's nose.

Then Zellie spoke, and he turn-flopped to her general direction with such intent that he almost rolled off the recliner.

"I have a question," she said, her voice hollow. She was sitting on the third row of seats, stiff but composed, her sunken eyes dry. From below, the set of her jaw was almost imperious.

The commander settled back on the table, motioned at her with his chin in silent invitation.

"How fast is this ship?" she asked.

" _Very_ ," he answered straight away. "Not the fastest by our standards, but less than five-percent of the Alternian ships would stand a chance in a chase. And we can do a thing called hyperjump, which dramatically shortens the amount of space we have to cross. So..." he shrugged. "In practical terms, we are _ludicrously_ fast."

"Does it require a precise and complete galactic chart?" she asked again, still very stiff.

"More than just that," he answered, unhesitatingly. "It's a piss-poor star chart if it doesn't contain at least one megaparsec of recent high-resolution data, and even that much is considered less than ideal unless it's live-updated."

"Then you know where Alternia is?" she asked.

"Yes."

"And your ship is _ludicrously_ fast."

"Yes."

Zellie's face was neutral and remote, but on the armrests of her seat her knuckles seemed about to rip through the skin on the back of her hands.

"Then why can't you take us back," she intoned without inflection.

Not even Twitchy's slapping at his own head could distract Karkat from the cold spreading under his skin. Zellie, oh my god. You brave asshole. Of _course_ they could and just didn't intend to, _why confront them about it—_

"Excellent question." The commander nodded in approval, almost more to himself than to her. "My answer starts with another question: ever heard of Gl'bgolyb?"

Even the air in the room seemed to sag in collective relief. Okay, that was random, but surprisingly mild as reactions went. What about Gl'bgolyb? The commander took off his glasses (his eyes really were yellow), stared thoughtfully at them, rotated them a bit in his hands. Pointed them at the seats. 

"I'm simplifying a _lot_ ," he said, finally. "The whole situation is mired in layers of politics, logistics and prophetic bullshit that are literally incomprehensible without cultural context I don't have time to give. But as you can tell from this ship alone, we take technology for granted that even the richest seadweller admiral would be hard-pressed to afford. We don't give a shit about castes. We can heal any physical ailment, we can extend lifespans, we can frigging bring a body back alive so long as there's enough fresh brain mass to recover a mind from. We— and this will definitely screw with your heads— we can choose a profession that has literally nothing to do with conquest or fighting or so much as stepping into a spaceship, and still be considered honorable members of society— _the look in your faces!_ "

He threw his arms up, almost jovial, and started pacing in front of his podium; unlike the measured, disciplined steps from before, his gait was predatory, filled with barely restrained energy. His face was thunderous, his eyes focused on some inner mental image.

"A troll of any caste can choose to devote their time entirely for technology, and within technology to focus specifically on spacecraft-shielding technology, and study and build and test shield after shield, using whichever materials, improving whichever model, coming up with completely new models, without ever having to worry about a sudden boarding operation, or a higher-blood destroying their work in a fit of pique, or dying in battle before the work is come to fruition— and so the work _comes to fruition_ , in a timely manner, and thus we have a shield the Empire _cannot. Compete. With_. Are you with me?"

He turned to his spectators, eyes glittering, febrile; Karkat nodded hurriedly, sweating cold, and almost jumped when Bobbit squeaked from behind him.

"Good!" he answered Bobbit's squawk with a smirk; when he resumed his pacing, it was subdued, almost tired. "The Empire cannot compete with our tech, that is true. In terms of military personnel they are superior in numbers, but depressingly pathetic when it comes to equipment, competence and, yes, experience. But the Empress, bless her proud, dumb soul, hasn't wrapped her head around this fact yet. According to our informants, she's been treating our entire conflict as a game— in which we're evil cheating pieces, and her pieces aren't rightfully crushing ours only because she hasn't given it her all yet. She's angry and frustrated, but only at her commanders' apparent lack of commitment."

He slowly walked back to the table, half-sat on it, leaned back on his hands.

"Our prophets and psychologists all agree that we're better off letting her think this way. In fact, for her to lose hope of winning this war is the absolute worst case scenario for all of trollkind— there's no doubt that she'd flip the table before accepting defeat. And most of her confidence lies on her control over the homeworld, which not even this ship can approach undetected. As long as she controls Gl'bgolyb, we can't risk it." He half-smiled at Zellie. "Does this answer your question?"

Zellie nodded, thoughtful and much more relaxed than before. "You keep mentioning a war..."

"On our side, not _officially_." The commander smirked. "Just a Conflict. It's an important distinction. But if the prophecies and portents are correct..." Karkat thought he saw the commander's eyes flicker Twitchy-wards, very fast, almost unconsciously, before focusing back on her— "...we might be officially at war by the time this grub reaches adulthood."

"Who _is_ "we"?" she asked, pointedly.

"The Coalition of Free Systems," he answered. "And more specifically, the United Galaxies." He fiddled with his glasses aimlessly. "The Coalition is basically a few thousand different species that have agreed not to get in each other's way. They encompass about twelve galaxies and—" quick pause— "twenty-five dimensions, give or take. You're not likely to deal with even five-percent of it, because..."

He frowned downwards, stared at his glasses for half a second, put them back on. 

"What are the odds..." he said, tentatively, "what are the odds of coming across an alien species out there which can... cohabit with trolls?" He waved a hand vaguely. "Which experiences reality— which we can _interact_ with? Normally?"

The kids exchanged glances and shrugs in about equal measures. 

"Which sees about the same spectrum of light?" He continued. "Speaks and hears a similar range of sounds, has a familiar biological make-up? Which are of generally similar sizes and shapes?" He shook his shoulders minimally, barely enough to call a shrug. "All specialists agree that the answer is pretty much zero, and that finding one is basically a miracle."

Above him, several other onlookers had since joined the white-haired troll at the glass railing: a hairless, white alien with slick-shiny skin, a couple of black ones, a brown one with reddish hair, a dappled one with two thin tendrils draping down from its creased head. A couple more trolls. They all watched their commander's speech with fond amusement.

"In ancient times," the commander intoned, as if reciting a wiggler's mnemonic, "there were Humans and Carapacians and they thought that was it. Then the Sylphides came along, and celebrations lasted several sweeps." He sighed. "When the Border Patrol caught wind of the Condesce's shenanigans, I'm told there was wine. The fancy kind. Ornamental light shows. Even when she started attacking, the reaction was less of fear than of glee. It took the _Great Crash_ —"

He stopped himself, shook his head minimally. "You can learn all about that in time. It's public record. Suffice to say— that's the United Galaxies: Allied species which cohabit on a regular basis." 

He pointed upwards without turning around; at the railing, the aliens laughed, cringed, flushed; one covered her face with a tablet and turned away, shaking with embarrassed mirth. 

" _Allies_ ," he quipped, with a crooked smile. " _Not_ servants. Now get back to work, you lot, half of you are on shift." 

He directed the latter towards the railing; some moved, others didn't bother. Karkat stared in bafflement as they leisurely exchanged comments, showed tablets to each other, crossed the space beyond the railing with wide but unhurried steps, obeying without any particular sense of emergency or fear. Half of the ones who stayed behind were aliens. 

He found himself trying to remember if he'd been a shit to Aleya back on the previous night. True, it was his personal policy to be an indiscriminate shit, but the idea was still very disconcerting. It didn't help that his memories were fuzzy at best. He mostly remember crying on her hand — was that offensive?

"Next question?" the commander asked, surveying the collection of distressed faces with a knowing smirk.

"If!!" Antara started, stopped, stared at the commander with wide bulging eyes before continuing. "If you can't take us back home— what is gonna happen to us?"

The commander's face softened, and he nodded at her with something like approval.

"To begin with, we're taking you somewhere to rest and heal from your diseases and wounds," he said. "That's slated to be the Major Institute for Ailments and Maladies in Telcontar 13, a planet in primarily human territory. It's one of the biggest and best equipped, has a great reputation and space to admit forty children in one go." His smile crooked a bit. "Or at least that was the arrangement when I left the meeting— there was a group lobbying to fly you straight to the Great Hospital in Bay Fors, which is the troll capital for us in the Coalition. It's a fine institution, but— actually, you know what."

He scooted to the side, and a section of the wall behind him turned into a star map, with a blinking ship-shape slowly moving across it.

"That's Telcontar 13," he said, and a spot on the map helpfully lit up in red even though he didn't so much as bother looking at the image. "From here it's roughly an eight-hour ride on a straight line in third-level hyper-jumps, about eight galaxies away from Alternian Space if you need a reference for the distance."

The map turned into an incredibly fancy palace.

"And that's the Major Institute for Ailments and Maladies, also called MIAM," he said, lightly. "It's one of the top-five best hospitals in the entire United Galaxies, that's how big a deal you guys are."

The star map came back, then zoomed out.

"And this is Bay Fors, capital Bay Fors," a small spot on the very edge of the map lit up, "which is a three-nights flight away on our fastest settings with no stops, and we'll be all out of fruit by then so nope. If we were going to stop for supplies we might as well just go straight to the MIAM anyway, which is what I told the Comuna, but they aren't thinking straight." 

The map turned into a slightly less fancy palace. 

"And that's Bay Fors' Great Hospital, part of the Institute for Troll Studies. A pretty cool place, but more of a research hub than anything." He shrugged. "There are plenty of other smaller but readier troll clinics out there, too. They're harping on this one for its symbolic value."

"And what _is_ its symbolic value?" asked the androgynous troll from the ship tour, sprawled bonelessly on their chair in a grand display of insolence as if they hadn't been shitting themself just as hard as everyone else not minutes ago.

The commander did not bat an eye.

"Being the first ever institution dedicated entirely to the study of troll physiology for the exclusive purpose of healing," he said, flatly.

"W-what's their track record?" asked Koumar-Grate-Keeper, almost jumping out of his chair in his hurry. 

The commander cocked his head like a confused bird. "Pardon?" 

"Like, how many failures per period, rate of successes per total experiments, rate of failures per successes per period per total per, er—" Koumar nervously counted on his fingers, digits tapping against each other loud enough to be audible— "I mean, what are the odds of survival, for us, in general, kind of thing."

The commander looked— disturbed, confused for a second, before his face went very carefully, studiously blank.

"Sorry," he said, adjusting his glasses; his eyes roamed over the carpeted floor with sudden interest. "For a moment I forgot I was talking to children fresh off Alternia. But... no," he looked back up at them, apparently back in control, "you don't get "failures" as such in the Great Hospital, or in the MIAM, or in any medical institute. If there's enough brain mass left, and it's fresh enough, then survival is pretty much guaranteed. Body parts can be regrown from cell samples. Diseases can be treated, and if anybody here is incubating something unknown, which our blood sampling didn't catch, the usual procedure is to put the afflicted in suspended animation until a cure is developed—"

"But you mentioned a research hub!" argued Kappei.

"I'm _starting to think_ we have wildly incompatible expectations for what research entails," he said, emphatically. "Let's try approaching this one from another angle." He regarded their blank faces. "The United Galaxies are very, very big on these laws called "inviolate rights", as a basic cultural tenet. These rights apply to literally everyone, with no distinctions of class or species. And the most important right is the right to be alive. There is _no such thing_ as culling where you're going."

Karkat had already been told that he wouldn't be culled for his blood, but his body still twitched almost as hard as Twitchy's at those words. It was one thing to know he would be spared, but a whole another thing to learn that the laws themselves said so. Holy shit! The revelation even brought a subdued hubbub to the otherwise silent seats. 

He turned to Twitchy with a hesitant smile, but it was wasted on the child. Twitchy was grimacing, his face contorted, his hovering fingers tensed into claws; all in all he gave the impression of being majorly constipated. 

Karkat sniffed the air experimentally, but Twitchy's shitting pants seemed to be handling the effort well enough. Well, whatever; he turned back to the commander, intent now that his speech had suddenly turned interesting.

"Another one is the right to a thing called Bodily Autonomy," the commander was saying. "It means that your body is yours and without your say-so no authority in the universe, not even that of the Queen of Skaia herself, could have a doctor— docterrorist— cut you open to check your innards. There is only one exception, and that is if you're literally dying and the intervention would save your life. In this case, saving your life takes precedence." 

Scar-nose kid leaned over Karkat's shoulder. "So i guess they can't do any experiments that might kill us!" he whispered.

"Though they could still lie about killing us, I suppose," Karkat mumbled back. 

"Bodily Autonomy means _you can't experiment on a troll at all_ ," the commander claimed, loudly and emphatically as if he'd heard their hissed exchange. "Either something will help a troll or it won't, and if it won't then it won't be done. Research is done on _cells_." He finally, for the first time, turned his head to face Karkat straight-on. "You know those vials of blood we took? That's enough to tell us every disease you ever had, and also several you may develop in the future. We'll know if you might get cancer, and then we'll make sure you _don't_."

He averted his gaze, focused onto some empty seats up the gallery, and Karkat breathed a sigh of relief; for a while there the staring had gotten a little intense.

"Bodily Autonomy also applies to other things that are done with your body, like sex," he said, shrugging very lightly with one shoulder, "or getting a tattoo when you didn't want one, or even having your hair trimmed without permission. I know the haircut example is closer to a prank than a truly dire situation, but culturally speaking the perpetrator will lose a lot of trust from their social circle if they change someone's appearance for laughs. And just so you know, no, being threatened or drugged into saying yes does not count as permission, it's just another crime piled on the original one."

He glanced very slightly back at Karkat, then back to the front.

"We do have a futzy case here, though," he said, indicating Karkat with a hand. Wait, what? "That kid on the recliner can't really say yes or no, because some assholes messed about in his head." (Whew, not Karkat, then), "I don't know about you, though, but it's pretty obvious that he's in a great deal of discomfort, is it not? Which's why I just summoned a doctor to come check on him. Until he's able to express himself, the protocol is to make sure he's comfortable and not in pain. The most experimentation we'll be doing is checking whether he feels better with his legs up."

The quip generated some scattered, half-hearted laughter. Karkat just twisted his nose. It all sounded very good, almost too much to be true, but doubt still hung thick over the room and made the commander's words sound weak, fakey. Now if only he was running at 100%, he'd be able to put his vast reserves of cunning to use and pull the dubious thread right to the heart of falsity that _ow_ did somebody just pinch his cheek—

The sting came from Twitchy's side.

He sat up and turned around in a single twist of the body, and watched in growing horror as the grimacing and squirming upgraded into an obvious, full-on seizure. Twitchy's head jerked and twitched, sparks spewing indiscriminately from horns and ears and hair alike; his arms shook in the air, stuck in place as if locked halfway to grabbing his head.

Behind him, Bianka suddenly jumped up her seat and then _over_ its back, staring at Twitchy's seizing form with a look of visceral, horrified disgust.

" _Psychic overload!_ " the commander called out, pushing away from his counter in alarm, but Karkat's hindbrain kicked in instead; he pounced on Twitchy and wrapped the twisting, sparking body in his arms.

"No!" he shouted, and then once again, " _No!_ " because that was the only word he could hear through the blaring in his head.

The blaring was interrupted by a snapping sound, followed by a heart-stopping surge of electricity.

Next he knew, he was staring up at the ceiling, gasping painfully for air that wouldn't come; above him he saw the white-haired troll suddenly lean in over the railing, his face dark and distant and murky but with alarm on the line of his hunched shoulders—

"He's _broadcasting!_ " the troll called out, and then someone was leaning over him, invading the dark clouds covering his eyes, jostling that crushing weight on his chest until he was suddenly coughing, choking, the taste of soup and digestion rising up his throat. He pushed up forcibly, stumbled past the brown hands that grasped for him; but he was enveloped by several small white shrouds before he could reach his seat.

"Stop! _Mutie!_ " someone said on his ear.

" _No!_ " he kicked and elbowed, and was being held by both arms and a leg by the time his wild eyes finally registered what he was looking at.

Twitchy's open, screaming mouth was a dark hole in a mass of thick golden psychic ropes— twisting, jerking, jumping around the chairs and on the floor like the dancing legs of a lightning spider. The seared seats nearby had been cleared; adults approached the lightshow with wires and boxes and careful steps.

"This ain't no overload—" one of them said, right before her implement suddenly popped apart in her hands. 

"He must be at least a level five psionic— maybe six—" another one called out, hunching under the rain of sparks being thrown out. 

From the corner of his eye Karkat saw a weird ripple— some cloth draped over the counter— but then it kicked, sat up in a snap, and it was the commander; his glasses were crooked, the right lens a ghastly hole into the twisted grimace that was his bloody face, and he was terrible to behold, a fearsome, wrathful god. He held something in a bloody fist like a lifeline, and raised his chin like a howling wolf to scream—

" _Disengage jump!! Dump spatial re-warp!! Engage emergency—_ "

And while the commander shouted orders to the air, Karkat saw— as if watching a farcical comedy from right behind the camera— saw Bobbit leap from the basket that a helpful teen was carrying away, scurry through legs and past hands and under chairs, climb up Twitchy's shaking leg and onto his lap with nary a care for the cataclysmic plasma shower it was under, circle around itself a couple of times.

And then the grub sat on its rear, raised its body majestically, lifted its front legs like a prophet. 

"Shit!" someone shouted over Karkat's head. "He's gonna do the thing—"

The thing was a pillar of light. The thing was the controlled spark that ran from Bobbit's raised legs, to its side horns, to its central horn and upwards in a column of blinding, unforgiving, thunderclapping plasma, that snapped and blew and sunk into the ceiling and made the entire ship go, for a very long second, dark and _utterly silent_. 

The lights on the ceiling didn't come back. The ones that did came from tiny wall panels, surrounding the seats in patches of fuzzy, indistinct illumination. Enough to see the charcoal dark smear on the ceiling, where the pillar of plasma had hit it head-on.

Bobbit curled into a ball and rolled down Twitchy's lap, wobbled on the floor, fell sideways in a stun. 

Now that the sparks were nearly gone— how? _How??_ — Twitchy was once again visible. He was a mirror to the commander, his face a bloody grimace, his white sleeves and shoulder spattered in mustardy streaks. His body still twitched and jerked under small bolts, but his hands were firmly clenched around one of his horns, the one with the drill hole, his fingers— his fingers digging in—

Karkat whimpered, a warbly, pathetic little moan of horror. 

Twitchy's blood-slick fingers were pulling something out. Something thick, mustard-smeared and grey. Something that undulated in his grasp.

With a final uncontrolled spasm of his arms, the _thing_ spattered onto the finely carpeted pit that separated the seats from the conferemonstrating platform; it twisted feebly, waving stubby, malformed little legs like a crippled centipede.

Bianka stumbled away from the squirming worm with eyes squeezed shut, ran into one of Radufe's friends, fell apart in shaking sobs; the white-haired troll jumped down from the railing and stared down at the _thing_ with a sneer of disgust.

"Bring a 14-b bio-wave container," he muttered to a technician, "and a pack of anti-empath bands. Also a lead casket if we still have one."

The technician hurried away, and was immediately replaced by a square, heavy-set blueblood in an indigo-blue overcoat who made a beeline for the commander.

"Not me, him!!" the commander vociferated, waving spastically at the seats, but the docterrorist paid him no mind; Twitchy was already surrounded by five other blue coats as well as a circle of alien tech, there simply wasn't space enough for someone else. 

Certainly not for Docterrorist Haazen, who ran in wearing a worn plaid ensemble instead of an uniform, a knitted cap dangling from a horn and a face crisscrossed by clothing wrinkles, and who took one bug-eyed, horrified look at the yellow-smeared wiggling worm before crumpling to the floor and meekly allowing his colleaguerrilas to tug him up and away.

Karkat sagged into the profusion of arms holding him back. Watching a docterrorist tug the pulped, weirdly gelatinous amber lens out of the commander's eye socket was bad enough, but imagining whatever was going on with Twitchy felt way worse. 

He glanced at the teen holding his arm. "Kappei," he said experimentally; he couldn't quite feel his lips.

"That's me," the teen in question answered, his roguish smile only slightly wobbly. "You really don't look so good, kiddo."

"What, what just," he mumbled. He was being pushed down onto a chair, and he didn't understand why. 

"Sparky launched you away, and a horn shard at the captain, or something," he said, slow and way too steady for some reason. "I'm surprised you even stood back up. Must have taken like five seconds for everything to turn to shit."

"Oh," Karkat gasped out, staring at the tube being pushed against his arm. His sleeve was off. His robe was blackened around his chest. The pain was fading away, enough for him to notice how much it hurt to breathe before the hurting was gone.

"I'm good," he told the haired-hornless alien fussing at him.

"Your heart stopped," she retorted, drily.

"Holy shit," he blurted out, and right then and there he paradoxically snapped out of his shock. 

He pushed up from his seat — thank fuck for super alien drugs — and stopped at a respectable distance from the circle of blue shrouds. Others followed him and stood in grabbing range, but he had no intentions of wading in this time, he just wanted to watch; and he watched Twitchy's scrawny feet twitch slightly under their ministrations, watched the white-haired lieutenant pick the _thing_ with some tweezers and carefully tuck it into a jar, looked over his shoulder at the commander quietly subjecting himself to the blueblood's unamused handling.

The lieutenant raised the jar, smirked to himself. "You should demand a re-evaluation from the Prophet's Guild," he said, lightly, turning the jar this way and that and making the smeary worm inside roll around gently. "Your current track record is way above Level Three."

The commander smiled thinly from under his docterrorist's busy arm. 

"Glad you think this way," he said. "I feel compelled to rely on this instinct a little longer. You said this thing was broadcasting?" His tone was vaguely interested.

Lieutenant Commander White-Hair grimaced. "Yes," he grunted out. "Passive enough at first that I didn't pick it out through the poor kid's state, but then it suddenly... activated."

The commander grunted an acknowledgement, and the lieutenant started wrapping the jar in weird transparent elastic follicle bands from a pack a technician brought. Once done he turned to Bianka, hanging far back in their small crowd, and raised the jar in a silent question. She made a face, waved a hand in a dubious motion; he tightened his lips together, shrugged in grim agreement, laid the jar carefully inside a box. The technician started handing bands out, silently pointing to the horns he didn't have. 

Nobody wanted to break the silence. Everyone's attention was on the low background hum of machinery, and how strong it did or did not grow with each passing second.

"Twelve hours," said the commander, suddenly.

"Hm?" the lieutenant looked up from his handiwork. 

"Since the pirate blew up." He started raising his head, but the docterrorist held it steady with a tut. "When the child started showing symptoms, it was exactly twelve hours."

"So you think his death started a timer?" the lieutenant asked. 

"His, or the machine in his quarters'," he answered. "They blew up nearly simultaneously."

There was a small, thoughtful pause.

"What's going on?" asked a wobbly voice, so feeble that Karkat could barely recognize it as his own.

This time, when the commander turned his head to Karkat in surprise, the docterrorist didn't make any attempt to stop him; if anything, she looked at Karkat with just as much interest, apparently abandoning the commander's cannula-ed, rag-plugged eye socket. 

Karkat took a deep bracing breath and stepped forward — a mincing, small step which he hated himself for — before asking again.

"What happened to Twitchy," he muttered, "what's this about the pirates, what was that thing inside his head, wasn't he fitted as a battery!?" His voice rose with each question. " _What in the scaly green fuck is going on?!_ "

All the adults in the block seemed frozen in guilty startlement; all except for the white-haired lieutenant, who hunched down and blurted out a small, nervous giggle.

"Okay, uh," he stepped away from the lead box, rubbed his face, pushed his hair back nervously. "I'm gonna— I can field this one, cap'n."

"Go right ahead," the commander muttered, with not a small amount of amusement, and turned back to the docterrorist; she hesitantly resumed her ministrations. 

The lieutenant stepped up in front of their group, clasped his hands together, took a deep breath, and... changed his demeanor entirely. His eyes widened, his body language lost all trace of formality; with his exotic uniform, stumpy horns and white hair, he looked more like a tall FLARPer than an officer.

"So!" he said cheerfully. "Among pirates, as well as pretty much any class of people you care to classify, there are two main types of assholes: the _major_ assholes, and the _minor_ assholes."

He paused. The children stared at him.

"Now, an easy way to differentiate between these types of assholes is checking which standards they hold themselves to." He drew himself up, every inch the lanky cheerful gamer, and grinned. "Like, even some of the biggest asshole pirates I've met would balk at the thought of selling _children_ to horny creeps!"

He paused again. The kids still showed no reaction.

"And that's why," he raised an informative finger, "they are _minor_ assholes. And it used to be that when a _minor_ asshole came across a child chained to someone's sofa, they'd just put the poor thing down. But!"

Another pause. 

"When the United Galaxies came into the picture, they started handing those kids over to us instead!" He opened his arms wide, happily. "Along with their batteries! As a gesture of goodwill and alliance!"

" _When_ did the United Whatevers come into the picture?" asked Zellie.

"And how are pirates even fucking giving away their batteries, that's _retarded!_ " Karkat flailed his hands in a paroxysm of frustration. "Whee, gonna pirate around with my ship what don't fly! _I'm an ally!_ "

"By exchanging them for _non-biological batteries!_ " said the lieutenant, undaunted. "No tentacles! No blood! No screaming!" He turned to Zellie. "And we're approaching the festivities for One-Hundred-Sweeps of Contact."

One hundred sweeps. 

_One hundred fucking sweeps_ , and no one in the home planet knew about this fuckery.

"So!" the lieutenant continued, as annoyingly perky as ever. "It turns out that being allied with us is pretty cool for pirates! Because they get to buy second-hand trash from us and sell it empire-ways for a fortune! Which is why every now and then we're flagged down by an asshole going _Yo man, check out this sick brat, let's be friends!_ "

His face went flat. Stony, cold, empty.

"...and that's when I look inside the fucker's head to see whether they grabbed the child themselves." 

And then, perking up again: 

"Because _major_ assholes are _not_ allowed in our club!" He clapped his hands together. "So what happened yesterday was that an unknown alternian ship requested non-hostile contact. They'd captured a ship from a rival faction, and lo! There was a child! A poor darling child, so very sick! And they'd heard we could be of help to the poor thing. And that we might even be able to help the poor fucker strapped to their engine, to boot! So if we could be friends, that would be _totally awesome_."

He rubbed his hands together, slow and lazily, his perky childish façade shifting into a predatory one.

"We met in their ship to fetch the alleged child, and to measure and discuss engine adjustments— and I took a look inside the captain's head as usual only to find that he was sadly a _major_ asshole. So off I went to track kiddie minds, and there were _dozens_ — and I must have made a face, because I clearly heard him think something to the effect of _well shit, gotta erase the evidence_ , and then he clamped his jaw down, and I swear on my pride as a mentalist that he had no idea his head was going to explode."

His face was once again that of the cold, competent officer. 

"As a matter of fact, we had intel from other assholes— _minor_ assholes— that a particularly influential imperial grandee had been negotiating with the bigwig in this crew's guild. Then again it's not unusual for empire agents to make a proposal that'll drive a pirate straight to us in disgust— it's just too bad that, for every pirate that rejects the empire's way, there's another that'll embrace it wholeheartedly." He shrugged a shoulder dismissively. "We can only work under the assumption that foisting a kid with a psychic brain parasite on us was the Empire's idea, and getting to sell off the rest of you was the pirates' reward."

His eyes narrowed. 

"The tooth bomb must have been a freebie."

And with that, the lieutenant seemed to consider his impromptu schoolfeeding session complete; he touched his fingertips together and stepped back as if surveying their reaction, though there wasn't much of one.

Not from Karkat's side at least. He took a few mostly ineffectual steadying breaths, blinked down at the stained patch of plushstepper, tried to file up all this new information. So... they were kidnapped by pirates under imperial orders? Who put a worm thingy in Twitchy's head? And a tooth-bomb in the pirate captain? Who tried to hand him off to these seditionaries from a rival empire? The facts were starting to outpace his ability to put them in context. What was going on? What was the point of this entire exercise?

"This is all giving me a headache," he mumbled, taking the scrunchie a technician offered and holding it dumbly until someone tugged it off his hand and wrapped it around his horn. 

It came to Zellie to take charge of their brainwork, as usual. She stepped up to the table, looked inside the box without even flinching.

"You said this was broadcasting," she said, grimly.

"Eyep," the lieutenant said, lightly, before closing the box with slap to the lid and a metallic sound. " _Aaaand_ still broadcasting."

"So we're being followed?" she asked.

"Most probably," he answered.

"A certainty," added the commander. He touched his docterrorist's elbow softly. "Don't bother with a replacement," he muttered. "Just make sure it'll hold under effort. I'll have to return to my previous functions shortly."

"Excuse me, I _am_ right here," the lieutenant said, loud and playful, but the commander just smiled fondly to himself.

"Damage report!" someone called out from above, and one of the white-carapaced aliens leapt over the railing; the lieutenant grabbed her as she dropped and deposited her back on her feet by the commander's side as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Go ahead," said the commander.

"Sir!" she saluted and raised a tablet. "Insulation dispersed thirty-two percent of the psychic surge, but the remaining sixty-eight percent were measured at nearly eight-hundred peta-pikas and resulted in severe overload in most of the command center's outbound circuitry, including nearly fifty-percent of redundancies. Diagnostics claim that roughly eighty-percent of the affected circuitry is salvageable, but all fuses and resistors will have to be replaced, estimated time five hours minimum."

"And the engines?"

"Beta was auto-dumped," she said right away. "Alpha almost hit the auto-dump threshold, but has stabilized and is now fluctuating at roughly twelve-percent gravitational flicker."

"Still too high," he said. "Dump it."

She tapped away at her tablet, presumably relaying the order.

"Gamma is undamaged," she continued once that was done. "Flicker at less-than-thousandth. Rerouting should take two hours at most."

"We don't have that much time," he said, and then added, almost as an idle thought: "What about shield and weapons systems?"

"Eighty-six percent operational," she answered, but despite her professional demeanor she shot him a knowing, warning look. "They feed straight from Gamma and weren't in range of the surge."

"Awesome," he said, his tone strictly neutral.

Finally, the docterrorist closed her toolbox with a snap and stepped away, her lips tight with displeasure as the commander stood back up. 

He pushed the remains of his glasses back in place. Over his right eye there was a very thick, tight-looking eyepatch. His cheek underneath was stained with diluted blood, and showed the beginnings of a very promising bruise.

"Don't reroute anything from Gamma," he said, walking away from the counter in slightly wobbly steps. "Whoever this bug is broadcasting to is probably halfway here already. Activate safe-mode; I'm overriding the neural buffer in five minutes, and that's final."

The lieutenant's hand shot out in a blur and clenched on the commander's shoulder, and Karkat could swear the man was about to slice his superior's throat off and take over— there was an empty, completely terrifying blankness to his face, the kind that alighted on people capable of literally anything... 

But nothing happened, except that the two stood locked in place for a few awkward seconds.

"You do remember we're carrying our species' greatest hopes in this vessel," said the commander, easy and calm; he didn't even turn his head to acknowledge the danger. 

The lieutenant's grasp tightened, before he let go with a jerk and turned away in restless pacing. The commander merely resumed his somewhat steadier path.

"Spin this report to the emergency council," he continued, presumably to the alien, "as well as the border stations, and let them know we're changing routes to— what are the nearest worlds with grade-A defense systems?"

"Luna-P," said the white alien, eyes on her tablet, "Pandora-Null, Excelsis-Five—"

"We're going to Excelsis-Five," he interrupted. "Inform them."

She saluted, turned around and walked over to the pacing lieutenant, who gently tossed her back over the railing before resuming his skulking.

Meanwhile, the commander stopped a couple of paces away from Twitchy's docterrorist huddle. It was dismantling, its members breaking away, picking up instruments, wheeling things out of the way; the commander surveyed this movement with nearly regal detachment before looking down at what he'd been holding in his bloodied palm.

It looked like a porous, jagged pebble, pale grey like old plaster on one side, a weirdly fossilized yellow on another. A lock of hair grew out of it like an ugly flower in a desert ruin, some of it still clumped together by the skin on its root.

Docterrorist Haazen and his plaid jammies walked by Karkat's field of view, froze momentarily at the sight, then resumed his hunched trek towards the new huddle forming around the _thing_ 's metal box, and that was when Karkat remembered the cement on the drill hole, and how it was shoddy, and—

The commander handed the pebble to one of the retreating docterrorists, and resumed his placid observation of Twitchy's treatormenting.

The last of the doctors was already stepping away with the last piece of equipment, and Twitchy was finally visible, his hair wet and plastered to his head and his eyes squeezed shut, uncomfortable but apparently unharmed. His arms suddenly loosened from his sides— they'd been stuck to his robe, the sleeves had been stuck to the robe, _their robes could restrain them of fucking course_ —, flopped to the recliner, some strange tubular collar unrolled from around his neck like a peeling fruit and he rolled his head to the side with a grimace before flapping unsteady arms and pushing himself up in jerks.

He sat up under his own power, swayed, opened crossed eyes. Blinked several times. Looked around himself at the crowd of silent robed children and breathless uniformed aliens. Kicked janky legs, pushed himself further and off the recliner onto his own feet, awkward and jerky like a malfunctioning robot, hunched and crooked like a zombie.

Then he laughed.

First it was a small breathless laugh, more like a wheeze. Then he straightened his back, went _huuurrrrrrrr_ , widened his eyes until they were about to pop. And finally he swayed, threw his head back, laughed _ahehehehehee_ , tottered, gritted his teeth, twisted his brow, clenched his fists, threw his arms up— and screamed an angry, defiant, victorious scream, to the scorched ceiling and whichever deity lay beyond.

The crew broke out in applause; most of the kids followed, confused as they were. A technician stepped forward with a tablet and Twitchy looked straight at it with the smuggiest, most dastardly smirk known to trollkind, even waited patiently as his picture was taken. 

"What's your name?" asked the technician, breathlessly, but Twitchy's smirk faded at the question. 

He stared at the alien, blinking in confusion, and his eyes went vague; his lips moved soundlessly, experimentally, before he finally said:

"Moooooooeeeeee."

He shook his head, swayed, muttered more soundless gibberish to himself; then he waddled his way around the frozen alien, lips moving non-stop, unfocused eyes wandering over the darkened room and its occupants.

"Mooee," he repeated, swaying at each step, arms held out for steadiness. "Mmmmooooeeeee. Mmmmm. Mmmmmmooo. Eeeeee. Aaaaaaa. Mooooooeeeeee." 

He flapped his arms, dragged his feet, shortened his steps, mooing and mumbling and shaking his head to himself until he buried his face into Karkat's sodden, hitching chest.

"Mui," Karkat mumbled through shaking lips, and Twitchy once again burst into wheezing, uproarious laughter, his nose squished against the scorched patch of cloth on Karkat's robe.

(There was a bald patch surrounding his big inner horn, and a translucent, jewel-like resin stoppered a small crater at its base.)

" _Buffer override in 60 seconds!_ " someone called from the railing above, breaking the silent bubble that had surrounded the two. The block burst into movement and sounds: running technicians, mumbling docterrorists, kids being ushered back to the seats, and only the commander stood still at the front, like an island of military aloofness.

"If I had programmed the protein dismantling for ten hours—" Karkat overheard Docterrorist Haazen say as he was ushered past the huddle surrounding the parasite's box.

"No, the patient was just too malnourished to—" interrupted another docterrorist, while a technician said, "With the information that you had—"

" _Sending first ping!_ " the commander called out.

Karkat squeezed past some big floating thing, still hugging Mui against his chest, then did a double-take; Cynael Wolfsister was there with her encapsulated moirail, looking confused and clueless, and he had no idea when she'd first showed up.

"...cerulean type AA! Maybe—," someone said from a huddle surrounding some sort of wheeled plateau. 

"...redirecting was causing his neural impulses to..." came from another huddle.

"...a neuron amalgam. Basically indistinguishable through basic imaging—" 

" _Sending second ping!_ " The commander called out again.

Karkat found himself being sat down on a row much farther back, with a premium view to the platform beyond the railing. It was dark and full of hurrying technicians and rapid-fire typing and only half the equipment appeared activated, but it still looked a lot like the pictures of the bridge he'd seen forever ago. White-haired Lieutenant had moved there at some point, and was now directing the traffic of busy people looking at tablets.

Veshna sat by his side, with Bobbit wagging its stubby grub tail in his arms and looking around itself with interest. It appeared completely unaware of the fact that it was a direct cause to the current mess. Then again, so did Mui, with his ass parked on Karkat's lap and looking around himself with interest equal to Bobbit's.

"Is it just me, or is it ridiculously crowded here?" Karkat mumbled to Veshna out of the corner of his mouth.

"It's like their entire crew's squeezed in," he agreed.

The seats were completely filled, even the scorched ones on the front. Technicians, docterrorists, people in what Karkat could only assume were off-duty clothes — only the commander remained on his feet, standing at attention at the podium as if about to conferemonstrate again. 

The commander shifted on his feet, and Karkat thought he saw a spark of gold corruscate on the skin of his cheek.

Mui touched Karkat's face, with somewhat more care than he'd previously employed, and tried to forcibly turn his head; at the same time, Bobbit started to slap insistently at his arm.

"Oh god," Karkat mumbled, at the same time as the commander said: "I'd like to clarify some facts to our young guests—"

Karkat wrested his face from Mui's grasp, turned to look at Bobbit and the prosthetic silicone grubleg he was proudly displaying. "What's it now— yeah, yeah, nice new glove you have, fucking _hell_ Twitchy, what's your damage—"

"As I speak, thirty imperial ships are approaching this vessel at twenty-five thousand light-sweeps per hour," the commander said, and Mui would find that Karkat's head was as immovable as a statue's, as was his entire frozen, horrified body. 

"Each of those ships is propelled by an unwilling slave," the commander continued. "Their confined limbs shrivelled and necrotic inside webs of parasitic neural interfaces, their brains lobotomized by components and techniques which have not evolved in thousands of sweeps of _glorious_ —" his contempt was palpable— "interstellar pillaging, their mental faculties stunted by sweeps of torture disguised as conditioning. But ours is a better ship." 

His shoulders stiffened with pride. "Not too long ago, some of you were introduced to our pulsar engines, each of which generates more energy than a tortured psychic." He raised a hand, as if presenting the still darkened block they were in. "We may be down to only one of three, but your guides had no means of knowing of the one other source of energy we have. It is not spoken about, but there _is_ a helmsman on-board, very experienced, with dozens of sweeps of screaming imperial service under his belt." He smirked. "He is standing right in front of you."

And then he turned around, toward the wall panels that lighted behind him; once again there was a strange gleam on his skin, but this time it stayed, intensified, shone like a web of golden tattoos crisscrossing his face and the back of his hands. Beyond the railing, the bridge's wide viewing panes gleamed with dancing yellow waves. 

"In this civilization," the commander grunted out, "in _our_ civilization, _a helmsman commands his own ship!_ "

For the first time in this trip, the children felt an acceleration shift push them back into their seats. The commander himself seemed immune to it; he was completely concentrated on his effort, or perhaps on the shifting numbers and lists changing faster than the eye could read on the screen before him. 

On the bridge, Lieutenant-Commander White-Hair walked back and forth, taking constant stock of the screens. On the next line of seats some alien was sobbing on their nonplussed neighbor's arms, going "oh, _commander!_ ". By Karkat's side, Veshna leaned in and whispered:

"Starting to suspect this guy is a major badass."

"Yeah," Karkat mumbled, distracted; Mui had finally captured his face, and was staring intently up at him with a beatific smile.

Or so it would seem to anyone looking in from outside. Certainly it would seem so to the emergency surveillance cameras recording every millisecond of this momentous, soon-to-be historical watershed incident. But to Karkat, who happened to have a close up view of Mui's glazed grin, it looked way too much like the smile of a maniac who intended to blow shit up, and was gazing lovingly at his carefully selected bomb.

* * *

_(Oooooooh, aaaaaah... oh, oh, oooooh...)_

_You have met the amazing Chalcedonian Pillars of Excelsis-One._  
_(Ooooooh... lalalala!)_

_You have swum through the fabulous Coral Palaces of Excelsis-Two._  
_(Ae! Ae!)_

_You have known the never-ending Auroras of Excelsis-Three._  
_(Aaaaaaaah, ooooooh, ooooooaaaaah...)_

_And you have witnessed the spectacle of a Tri-Lunar Conjunction at Excelsis-Four._  
_(La— la— la— la— la—)_

_Now... it's time to pack your chips for your first visit to... Excelsis-Five!_  
_(Excelsiiiiiiiis!!)_

_Experience all the comfort and commodities you are familiar with in a brand-new setting._  
_(The comfooooort, the settiiiiiiiing...)_

_Witness the glow of our gentle sun through Excelsis-Five's vast web of Crystal Roads, our creative team's latest technological and architectural marvel!_  
_(The marveeeel, Excelsiiiiiis....)_

_Take a magical promenade over suspended paths of delicate frost, multifaceted stairs and translucent archways—_  
_(Hey, ey, ey)_

_—or travel on our award-winning network of Excel-speedsters — now in crystalline version — if you're on the go._  
_(Goooooo!)_

_Challenge your mind and body in our hyper-immersion multi-player entertainment systems— now boasting the latest standard in Empyrical Hyper-sensation technology—_  
_(Immersion, sensatioooon...)_

_—or visit one of our thirty-five-thousand observatory towers, and gaze beyond the Coalition's very boundaries._  
_(Boundariiiiies, Excelsiiiiis...)_

_Visit our website for ongoing information on the best coordinates from which to watch the Alternian Galaxy with your naked eye._  
_(Hey, ey, ey)_

_Enjoy your stay in a planetary system boasting a Grade A-95 security certificate. Your health and safety are our greatest priorities._  
_(Goooooooo!)_

_Excelsis-Five. Your newest vacation destination._  
_(Excelsiiiiiiis!)_

  

The flight was... it was. 

Once past the initial burst of speed, some of the crew members stood back up, going back and forth between seats, gathering into clumps, checking on some kid here, another there. One of them approached Karkat with more little pumps to inject under his knee; every other minute someone else would show up to push something into Mui's arm. 

Objectively it took a little less than twenty minutes, which Karkat spent obsessively double-checking his tablet for the time and for sporadic information notices. ETA 15 min. Acknowledgement from Border Station Something-something. ETA 11min. Another from Excel-whatsit. A map of who knew what with a bunch of dots labelled "shelter". ETA 8 min. Stations This and That and This Team and That Team on the way. Throughout, the commander stood silent like a monument to badassery, his body leaning forward as if he were pushing the ship with his body as well as his mind. 

Subjectively, the flight seemed to stretch interminably into certain doom— at least until he found himself bored of being anxious; then his muscles relaxed on one second, and on the next, padded restraints wrapped him around the arms and torso, squishing him and Twitchy together against the chair as the ship slowed down.

Beyond the glass railing, a glittering planet covered most of the bridge's far wall. 

The commander straightened, relaxed his shoulders. Turned to look at them. "This is Excelsis-Five," he said. His face was glittering with golden lines and beading sweat. "Once this ship docks, you'll be led to the emergency exits and into the space harbor. It'll be completely different from anything you've ever experienced or learned about in Alternia."

Now that the ship was done decelerating, the padded restraints retreated to wherever they'd come from.

"To begin with, the sun is harmless," the commander continued. "Don't flinch, don't stop to think. Just stay together as a group and follow our crew members. They'll lead you to shelter-hives, which will resist any and all outside attacks— even if the planet blows up, the inside of a shelter-hive will remain completely untouched. And if you become separated in any way, follow the map forwarded to your tablets and stick close to any moving group."

The viewpanes were now completely occupied by the corruscating planet, its intrincate patterns flashing like glass doilies under the light of the system's star. The commander seemed to sigh; his shoulders rose slowly, fell heavily. His skin glittered.

"Had our talk gone as envisioned, we could have delved more deeply into this topic," he said, eventually. "But before you step outside, you must know this. There is no such thing as a Mother Grub in the United Galaxies. Its inhabitants reproduce at a rate of one or two young for every adult, at most. And until an adult is considered ready to produce children, they are outright discouraged to. Children are _rare_."

His glasses had slid halfway down his nose during his effort; over the amber rim, his one good eye roamed over the rows of children, as if trying to take them all in simultaneously.

"Children are precious," he said. "Children are _important_. So important, that the thought of leaving a child in the sole care of a lusus is the source of both laughter and anguish to many in the Coalition." 

He paused, as if considering what to say next. Once he seemed to reach a conclusion, he shifted on his feet, relaxed his shoulders. Stopped being a statue, went back to being a troll.

"When you step outside, you'll be surrounded by adults," he said, in a concluding tone. There was tiredness in his voice for the first time. "Don't be alarmed if some of them spontaneously decide to protect or coddle you. It is... cultural." And then: "We've arrived. You can leave your seats now. Godspeed to us all."

All the adults rose to their feet, and Karkat stumbled up as well in surprise. Mui kicked around in confusion, smacked his heel on one of Karkat's feet.

"I see!" Veshna hissed as he rose— he hissed everything, of course, but this was a particularly excited hiss. "These poor fuckers can't repopulate on their own, they depend on combing the universe for stray children to fill up their own numbers! This all makes sense now." And as they filed out of the seats: "But damn, there's no way they can find kids faster than their lowbloods are dying out. No wonder he keeps calling us a big deal, we must be a _find!_ "

Between holding Mui back from swaggering his way into diving down the stairs while simultaneously being carried by the exiting crowd, Karkat barely registered those words. Something about shit making sense? Shit sure didn't make sense for him. At that particular point he was just going with the flow, sort of literally.

The flow took him to a door on the lowest level, rather than the one he remembered coming in from. It led to a long half-lit corridor, which stirred some half-buried memory he quickly shoved back down, but the shuffle of feet and the subdued murmuring soon carried him to a bright fork on the path which was somehow turning the wrong way from— whatever he was vaguely remembering.

He turned right into the bright tube, arm wrapped around Mui's fidgety shoulders, and eventually found himself stepping out into a whole other universe. 

It was unmistakably comprised of Palace. 

Rather, it was the third location he'd been shown within the last hour or so which his mind had instantly branded as a palace. Yet it was, somehow, by far, the most gratuitously ostentatious, impossibly opulent of the lot, and if it turned out to be some other sort of building like the other two he'd fucking eat his good foot. 

The tall walls were marble, the humongous roof was vaulted, the joints and corners were delicately carved and decorated with curlicues and sparkling stones; immense windows were covered in single glass panes that seamlessly alternated lines and patches of transparency, frost and flakes, breaking the bright white light outside into a tapestry of tiny rainbows on the polished floor. Incongruous crystalline gazebos were scattered through the grand hall, their counters and windows proudly displaying all sorts of colorful, incomprehensible collections, from jewelry to fussy-looking candy.

He took all that in, wide-eyed, as he dragged Mui's laggy ass behind the retreating group of kids and crew.

"The shelter is straight ahead this way," said an adult voice right over his head. Karkat didn't have time to be startled before a tablet screen was thrust— not on his direct line of sight, at least; the alien had the sense to hold it level with his chest for him to look down. The map therein displayed a slightly crooked line with a blinking red dot in the end, but that was all he retained before Mui jabbed his finger on the screen full-force and hurr-hurred at its fake-shattering.

"Stop that!" Karkat slapped him with the hand wrapped around his torso, and turned to the adult keeping pace with him. "I can figure out a map, you don't have to pre-chew my meal!"

"Do you have your tablet?"

"Yes, in my sleeve!" Karkat spat out in irritation. "This one! Wait, no—" he was going to wiggle his left arm, but its sleeve had vanished after Mui electrocuted him; he wiggled the elbow that was wrapped around the kid instead. "This one. Yeah. I can feel it poking my—"

A deafening noise slammed through the palace, shook the walls and floor, sent Karkat sprawling awkwardly to the smooth pavement. The magnificent windows rippled and went milky white; one of the nearby gazebos shivered ominously, wobbled like a gob of grubjelly, and sagged into itself like a mix of cobweb and frost instead of showering them in deadly shards.

A horrible, tortured screech echoed on the vaulted ceiling.

Karkat pushed up on his elbows, looked back in bewilderment at the ship he had just fled. At some point it must have been held in place by those twisted and melted and sparking clamps, but now it hovered ominously under a golden halo, and was in the process of disgorging the pirate's ship from its distant stern like it was so much biological waste.

The difference in cleanness, sleekness and size between the two vessels made the comparison much too apt.

Karkat was still trying to come to terms with the mental image of a ship defecating a ship when the— process— was finished, and the coalition vessel disappeared in a smear of psychic plasma, taking half the clamps and part of the luxurious outer marquee along for the ride. It didn't even wait around for the pirate vessel to finish crashing and rolling its way down the bright wherever that lay beyond the building. What was even there? Why was the ship still clanging in the distance?

His questions were interrupted by a distant boom. It did not sound like a ship smashing into the ground. 

"Fuck—" someone screamed, back at the silent, surprised crowd. "Fuck. _Fuck!_ " The scream approached, and soon the Lieutenant was running past, hands up, almost comical. "Fuck! _Fuck!_ " His voice cracked. " _Fuckty-fucky_ _ **fuck!**_ "

He stopped, and Karkat finally understood the purpose of the raised hands; the Lieutenant had his fingertips to his temples in what sweeps of pop-culture informed him was a pose characteristic of psychic effort. But it only lasted about two seconds before he threw them down in disgust, and then tossed them up with a last, shrilly " _Ffffffuuuuuuuck!_ ".

Another distant, weirdly high-pitched boom punctuated his expletive. His shoulders made an aborted attempt at sagging, ruthlessly interrupted when he turned around on his heels with military precision, his face carefully neutral. One could almost swear it was devoid of fear.

It did suddenly fill with frustration, though. " _What the fuck are you looking at?_ " he shouted, and Karkat quickly turned back to check the source of his distemper.

He had _not_ noticed that huge fucking crowd, coming in.

Or... maybe he had assumed they were all kids and ship crew. Everyone had been moving, everything had been weird and shiny and disturbing. But a crowd it was, very alien, very colorful, and half of it was staring at them in dumbfounded silence, the other half slowly funneling away at a sedate pace into a bright gate. For the first time he noticed a disembodied female voice speaking alien in the slightly fakey, slightly bored tone of an informercenary.

" _Get moving!_ " the Lieutenant yelled, flapping his hands as if shooing away a recalcitrant lusus. " _Get going!_ You too!" He turned to Karkat, wild-eyed, pushing the air above Karkat with his palms. Karkat half-stumbled to his feet, helped by the adult nearby, and the Lieutenant grabbed Mui's underarms and set him standing; then, perhaps thinking better, he grabbed Mui again and ran ahead, one arm wrapped around his chest and the other flapping and shooing above his head.

Unencumbered, Karkat shot out away from the sound of explosions with a less than graceful gait. Amazingly, he reached the conglomeration of vastly outnumbered white robes without issue, looked around himself at the now familiar faces with unexplainable disbelief. Now what?

Zellie, on top of things as usual, had her tablet out and was whipping her hand over it as fast and sure as a kabbalistyrant over their fake cueball. 

"Up ahead is a bridge," she said. "There isn't a river or a hole underneath or anything, just some fancy plaza. Blah, blah, avoid the bridge in case of structural damage or earthquakes higher than meh, some number, go downstairs and cross the plaza or go to this other shelter that's farther away, what?— Oh, okay, that's not that far—"

The funnel of fleeing aliens suddenly opened up behind them, and nobody waited around to hear the rest; they all shot down the bridge as fast as they could, Zellie included. 

The bridge was a glass tunnel. Its curved ceiling had gone white and saggy at spots, but the floor under Karkat's feet was clear. He could see the plaza underneath, rippling as if he were looking through a thin sheet of water; it was hard to tell from the angle, but he couldn't spot any jute or conferemonstrating podium — there was just a water trap surrounded by weird sparkly pavement. Kind of a shoddy paving job, even, since a bunch of grass and flowers was growing through it in spots— maybe it had been a while since their last public execution and the plaza got overgrown?

The foot traffic up ahead became congested again, and Karkat found himself stumbling over a truly astounding collection of heels. His horn brushed some weird rubbery cloth; a closer look revealed it as one of the saggy protuberances drooping from the ceiling, its weird whiteness a conglomerate of very small cracks when seen from up close. Shuffling past the drooping cracks he finally came across a spot clear enough to see out of.

Holy shit, it really was daylight. 

The sky was a pale teal, and a few wispy white clouds floated by; past them, hexagonal patterns of light flickered in and out of existence, blocking the onslaught of distant fire. Flicker, spark, silence. Boom, came a belated thunder. Dark dots zoomed around the flickering shields like flies headbutting a jar.

There was a flash from above. The wispy clouds evaporated, and a patch of milky-white glass narrowly spared Karkat's eyes from taking the light straight-on. His ears popped and went hot — he could swear the wax inside was melting — and the air thrummed and pressed him down, progressively louder like a cascading drumroll.

It was over almost as soon as it started, but the sensation of slowly sinking down didn't pass even after he swallowed a couple of times, shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut.

Popping his ears did allow him to detect the almost discreet series of snapping sounds nearby.

"Oh, awesome," said Zellie, her tone particularly unenthusiastic. She pursed her lips at her tablet, then up over some of the heads nearby. "I mean, in a way it really _is_ awesome, but also spectacularly unhelpful."

"What?" he snapped at her. 

The "what" was clarified when hands lifted him by his underarms. His body locked in startlement, then relaxed again when the situation reasserted itself; he looked ahead from his new vantage point, and saw the floor up in front leisurely rise above the river of adult heads.

Along the uneven seam of the crack, the bridge's transparent floor stretched down like a sheet of plastic, or a glitch in reality. The uneven barrier it created reflected the distorted images of children as they were passed from adult to adult like a relay dagger — Karkat among them — and hoisted up between the slowly narrowing gap between the stable floor on one side and the sinking roof on the other.

An alien child was raised, crying and clinging to the hand that offered her up. Bobbit serenely surveyed the situation from his new spot, cupped in the hands of an alien in some strange party outfit. The roof was now near level with the heads of the helpful adults beyond. The hands relaying Karkat became almost frantic; up ahead, someone hoisted Mui up to the narrowing gap and he screeched, kicked his legs, sparked and stretched his arms toward Karkat...

...and that was it, the gap was now too narrow to risk passing through anymore. A mottled brown hand waved cheerfully at the crying alien child, wristbands jangling, until the kid's pinched face went out of view— and then the calves started to turn around and move on, some hurrying, some hesitating, until there were but a couple pairs of shoes left behind for the gap to chomp around.

Karkat was put back on his feet. The sky flashed again; he had the sense to cover his ears and head this time, brace himself against the thrumming air. The drooping bridge rattled around him, fell faster, then gave a sudden, solid _thump_. When Karkat opened his eyes again the crowd was back to moving, ripping through the watery sheet and jumping out. The bridge had touched the ground. 

He stumbled out into a clump of singed flowers, already half-crushed by the previous feet, and glanced up at the bright teal sky.

Psychic-charged rays rained down from the growing number of fly-sized ships; the hexagonal shields appeared in myriad layers along the line of each shot, weakening its impact until it dispersed in a high-pitched explosion. They all dispersed far, far above in the atmosphere, barely more than a spark in the distance. None of them could possibly be the source of the impact flashes. Then what...?

A line of sleek ships, each identical to the one they'd been in, shot upwards and fanned out toward the side opposite of the assailing armada, and even though he was in the middle of running, Karkat risked looking back over his shoulder to follow their path. 

An immense, wide beam of red-and-blue pushed through toward their group, burning a dark diagonal in Karkat's sight; it plowed through a veritable tower of rotating light shields until it finally smacked against a familiar golden halo. The wind slapped down mercilessly, the air became suffocatingly hot, the sound of impact ran the gamut from shrill to booming as it travelled through his bones.

But the _Singularity_ held. Battered and scarred and no longer sleek, it covered their retreat with its own hull. 

* * *

The world vanished from under Karkat's feet, and he found himself kicking ineffectually at the air for a couple of seconds before his feet landed back awkwardly on the quivering floor. A collection of hands shot out of nowhere to smack at his chest and grasp at his robe and somehow, miraculously, spare him from a faceplant; instead their tangle of limbs stumbled for several paces until the inertia finally bled out. 

He was still reeling, eardrums throbbing, when a surprisingly cold shadow fell on him. 

"This way!" someone shouted from above; it was a weirdly but sort-of-martially uniformed troll riding some sort of shielded, handlebar-equipped floating device— one of several hovering above their heads, ridden each by its own uniformed creature screeching instructions at their panicked group. "To the speedster-tube! Orphans in the middle! Stay together!"

And then they set out once again into an awkward lope, the weird hovering fighters circling over their heads like fussy mosquitos. 

This next leg of the trip went by Karkat in flashes of alien scenery: webs of broken glass shivering in walls and windows, sagging gazebos with their display wares askew, dangling crystal lamps dancing every which way, shrivelling lawns and crushed flowers and drunkenly waving trees. Another flash and boom; above and ahead some of the hovering fighters executed a complex-looking maneuver, and soon he found himself clambering through a newly-cut opening into a vast echoing cave of salmon-colored glass.

He stumbled inside, ran wildly and thoughtlessly for several feet, and suddenly noticed his arms were flapping free.

Oh god where was Mui.

He froze on his tracks and looked back dumbly, watching the crowd scatter past him like a spooked herd. He could see several other robed children in the process of climbing inside, desperate to escape the renewed flashes— was it just him or was one of them moving more uncertainly? Was that distant straggler wobbling overmuch on their feet? 

An adult alien suddenly blocked his sight, leaning down until its freaky brown face was almost touching Karkat's. The alien was very earnestly speaking something in alienese, its meaningless mouthsounds mixing with the disembodied informercenary's voice as the latter blathered — in Alternian — about shelters; a clammy hand touched Karkat's sleeveless shoulder and he slapped it off, slapped the face a few times for good measure, and when the alien did nothing but flinch harmlessly for several seconds Karkat deigned to push and slap the idiot thing toward everybody else's general direction until it caught the message and moved on under its own power.

Others attempted the same, but Karkat learned soon enough to just push them on their way before they were done slowing down. This was probably the cultural thing Commander Badass had warned them about; these adult aliens were merely being compelled to check on whether this frozen Rare Youth required manual rebooting or not, and there was no point in being an asshole to them about it.

If his stillness was the cause of misunderstanding, then he might as well move. He ran toward the shiny white robe limping cheerfully behind the line of panicked orphans, and though they stared in confusion no adult tried to touch him again. Mui waved at him — or so Karkat interpreted his arm spasms — and limped slightly faster, until Karkat reached him, hugged his torso and _finally_ dragged him back down the path to safety. 

Predictably, the path to safety became unsafe less than two minutes later. The manner of it was certainly cause for surprise, however, as it involved a massive shadow dropping from the sky and hitting the speedster tunnel — currently suspended over many crisscrossing walkways — right at its very edge. 

No one was crushed, but a section of the tunnel hurtled very speedily down, stretchy transparent coating or not, and it happened to be the one with Karkat inside. 

It hit a suspended road crossways, wobbled and rotated as its underside skid on ornamental railings; a hovering alien zoomed past overhead, and soon enough the world skipped, shuddered, and finally settled.

Karkat risked opening an eye, attempted to untangle his legs from Mui's. Their section of tunnel was sparsely populated: four white robes (Karkat, Mui, some older teen and the kid with a scar on his nose) and three adults, one of which was a hovering guardestroyer alien and the only one not sprawled ass over teakettle on the cracked glass-like floor.

"Everyone ambulatory?" the hovering guardestroyer asked, floating overhead and running her eyes efficiently over all their toppled limbs. She asked what Karkat assumed was the same question in a couple of different languages — the other two adults were a hornless-haired and a hornless-mottled — before hovering down closer to the ground.

She exchanged some rapid-fire words with the two aliens — in a single language this time, but which the two of them appeared to understand. They both seemed dismayed by her words, but were soon assenting in rueful acceptance. She then turned to the four orphans, her slightly scratched, transparent face-plate reflecting the strange cool daylight bleeding in from the tunnel exits.

"We have two problems," she started, and pointed to one of the exits. "One, the avenue is collapsed on that side. Our only option is to go that way—" she pointed to the other exit "—which branches into a plaza. Our second problem is the huge fucking metal ball that just fell on it."

A landing module. _That_ was what crashed on their tunnel. Phase two of the imperial invasion was underway. 

"We have to run past it," she continued. "I am confident that I can hold back anything it disgorges, but you need to stay out of the way and _keep running_. Can you do that?"

Karkat didn't bother consulting the other children before nodding. What choice did they even have? 

The group ran outside with varying degrees of limping, only to find that in the time they'd been under a roof, the situation upwards had gone straight to fuck. The sky was so peppered in light shields it looked like a great beehive dome glitching in layers; between sheets of forming and reforming canopies, all the sleek ships were converging onto the huge, ponderous, scarlet, trident-shaped one, now a good way into the maze of hexagons.

_Shit_.

Those small shiny ships pounded the Battleship Condescension with bright lights, dark projectiles and no apparent effect. A very battered vessel with a familiar yellow halo hovered nearby like an insect in wait; even as Karkat looked, it shot some sort of ordnance at a bright plasma beam as soon as it formed, close to its source, and the beam spread into a shower like a spray of hose water being blocked. 

Each highly-powered drop of that shower was weakened and eventually stopped by light-shields. But as the shields converged onto the dispersed shot, the canopy seemed to weaken, and the alternian armada took advantage of that opening to drop familiar dark spheres from their bowels; and those fell unimpeded a good ways down before the shields finally recovered enough to manifest before them.

And then the situation suddenly veered towards the comical. Each landing module bounced onto a shield, stopped, fell again when the shield dispersed, was once again stopped, rolled off, bounced _again_ — approaching the surface in fits and spurts and not an ounce of dignity. It certainly explained the landing module they were about to attempt to run past.

Their current pathway was one of many wide roads suspended high over an abyss of more dainty, decorated glass promenades. They converged onto a wide, very solid-looking plaza— a circle of glass paths, plants and water pools and centered by some strange shiny structure, a half-crushed decoration flimsily supporting the lopsided module. It lay unopened on its bed of debris as if stunned, a likely representation of the current state of its contents. God, it was probably painted with puke inside.

Other aliens were running up a side-path to the plaza, apparently attempting the same stunt they were about to. The module shuddered, shifted; to their credit, the group barely hesitated before flooding the plaza anyway, circling wide and away from the menacing orb. Hovering fighters lingered around the sphere, waiting, attentive, shielding the trail of people at their back. Everything seemed to be working as it should.

Karkat's group was still halfway up their own path when the module lurched, rolled upright, and finally deployed its affixitive shellclaws. 

The sight of the module's shell dilating open, of the unboarding ramp dropping onto a flowerbed, plunged Karkat's mind into a swirl of conflicting impulses. Maybe if he ran _towards_ the opening, they would take him back— _they would sell him_ — they would protect him— _they would cull him_ — they would accept him— _they would rape him_ — it felt like the impulse to jump when he looked down from a high ledge, and maybe recognizing it as such was the reason why he didn't, in the end.

Soon he would be glad for this instinct. About as soon as the first bruised, maddened, puke-smeared lusus booked it out of the module, screeching and shaking its head, and tossed itself blindly over the plaza's railing. 

Behind it came some huge flapbeast in a blur, cawing in indignation; a lionmom shot past right afterwards, hit the railing head-on, and coughed out what one could only hope was a hairball. An enormous, ponderous spearboar stumbled out drunkenly onto the flowerbed, its front paws clutching an armored and facepalming threshecutioner against its belly, and then curled down over him on a debris-free patch of floor with all its protective dorsal blades fully deployed. (A significantly-sized nut-creature lusus was still speared in them.)

There was an expectant pause in the beastly parade, which their group took advantage of by skirting as far away from the module as possible. Karkat could swear he heard some vaguely comedic sounds coming from within, including something like a cluckbeast, maybe, and perhaps what one could describe as many rolling potatoes. The chaos over their heads made it hard to tell for sure.

Then a line of mismatched threshecutioners finally trickled out, stumbling on half-depetalled flowers, clutching their sickles and gritting their teeth and looking uncombed and peaky like a band of clown cultists recently awakened from the aftermath of a week-long bender. Some even sported feathers in their hair, or stuck into their armor joints.

The only one even remotely together was the one walking in front, her gleaming captain badge pinned smartly where the symbol-lines of her uniform joined together. An enormous manticorgi padded by her side, its open maw displaying the five lines of fangs characteristic of its species. They were both bedraggled like their underlings; but where the latter looked amusing like wet chirpbeasts, the captain was their tomahawk progenitor, her blue eyes glowing in cold fury, willing and able to take payment for her indignity in blood and guts.

And then more potato sounds came from inside the module.

"Evrain!" someone shouted. " _Evraiiiiiiin!!_ "

A maddened troll kicked his way down the unboarding ramp, crocogator lusus under an arm and sickle at the other, slicing and elbowing and kicking his colleague's backs in a frenzy; while all others toppled under the furious hooves of his screeching madness, the blueblooded captain was the only one to react in time, turning around with sickle ready to rend as soon as he passed her by. 

One of the hovering guardestroyers shot her as soon as she turned around, making her topple onto her manticorgi and clearing the crazy screaming troll a path straight ahead to Karkat's group. The fact that he had tossed his sickle to one side and his threshecutioner emblem to the other did not at all make the prospect of a frontal collision any more pleasant.

"Keep running!" said their guardestroyer, now flying parallel to their group, on the flank their new crazy friend was coming in from. Then she started chattering to herself: "Unconfirmed enemy deserter on impact vessel twenty-two, demanding _Evrain_. I repeat, _Evrain_. Over."

The threshecutioner managed a tight corner as they ran past, caught up with the guardestroyer and stared at her bug-eyed as he ran alongside. "Evrain!" He repeated, then closed his mouth and stared for half a second before initiating a series of spastic motions on the area around his horns in some piss-poor attempt at communication.

"Is that a name?" asked the guardestroyer, and the threshecutioner's shoulders visibly lowered in relief.

"Yes! I mean, yes, like. Yes, she's a friend and we—"

"As long as she's registered then she can be located. But right now is a _really bad time_ for this!"

"Evrain Battik!" he continued, wheezing, his crocogator-dad wobbling at the neck and sadly frothing from its maw.

" _Line of sight!_ " she said instead, and the threshecutioner immediately fell back and bowed so she could shoot over him.

_And that's how our motley crew acquired a threshecutioner deserter_ , Karkat narrated to the posthumous autobiography he was mentally writing to himself. A Threshecutioner! _Deserting!_ Deserting as in abandoning his post and stabbing co-workers in the back and leaving his battalion in the dust and basically giving up on being a threshecutioner to beg at the enemy's feet. That was crazy, and nuts, and tragic, and totally movie material if anyone survived to write the script.

He felt a little disappointed anyway.

"You know," Karkat wheezed out to the threshecutioner in question, "it's kind of a dumb feeling," the threshecutioner looked down at him bug-eyed, "in this situation," the threshecutioner was still bug-eyed, "but being a threshecutioner," something whizzed overhead, "was my dream," the whizz became a bang, "and I feel like," wheeze, "you kinda shat on it," wheeze.

" _Fiddlesticks!!_ " the threshecutioner roared. "Fuck! Fiddles. Fiddles! _Sticks!_ This is a _pupa!!_ " he glared at one of the aliens at random. "Are you lot _stealing our pupas!?_ "

"These children were rescued from a pirate ship," the alien said in perfect unaccented Alternian, to Karkat's surprise. It was the hornless-haired one; his face was beige-red and flab-softened, gross and beaded with sweat, but behind his glasses he looked intent and straight-on at the threshecutioner. "They were taken from the home world, possibly with the auspices of the Condescension herself."

"That's impossible!" the threshecutioner spat out; but a massive explosion at their back cut off his incoming argument, and the subsequent several seconds of screeching deafness did not help. Debris rained down around them; their assigned guardestroyer pointed silently to one of several marquees up front, and they huddled underneath, gratefully.

The guardestroyer stood at their rear, holding up a tall curved shield against the hailing pieces of presumably masonry; she was babbling to herself in alienese, maybe reporting to someone. Squishy pieces of webbed glass flopped down around them and over the half of crocogator that didn't fit under their shelter. Mui giggled to himself under Karkat's armpit. 

The threshecutioner turned to the alien as if he hadn't been interrupted at all.

"First of all Her Condescension was the one who forbade us to go back in the first place." he started. "And She despises outlaws! She'd _never_ connive with their like!"

"There were forty children in the captured vessel," the alien said, implacable, still looking at him straight on. "Their account of the kidnapping does not mention the drone swarm that automatically strifes unauthorized entries. The vessel itself showed no sign of orbital damage either."

"How do you know our orbital ofense strategy!?" the threshecutioner looked downright offended.

"I'm a reporterrorist," the alien answered, adjusting his glasses lightly. "And your alternian offense strategy is common knowledge, as knowing about it is what keeps most of you _out_."

The threshecutioner squinted sideways at him. The suspicion was understandable; the alien wore no armor, had no shoulder-mounted high-definition light-spectrum-absorbing grubcams, and was in fact wearing some pretty flimsy alien ensemble in colors that didn't match his brown eyes. One could tell by the look on the threshecutioner's face the exact moment he dismissed the discrepancies as weird alien shit.

"Nevertheless," he continued, smug as if he were but deigning to humor this fakeporterrorist, "all this tells us is that someone within the _Recruit Overseizing, Anti-Elopement and Cluckbeast Tracking_ Orbital Patrol let them in. Some administraitor desk-helmsman probably sold out to a gang. Tealbloods are wishy-washy by nature."

"You are an egregious shitmonger and you should be ashamed of yourself," said Karkat, thinking of Terezi— but he said it _super_ softly, and the sounds of war overhead drowned his voice. He wasn't _that_ stupid.

"The vessel was part of the Guild-Alliance of the Furry-Winged Flapbeast's Aggrievance," the alien reporterrorist continued, unflapped. "The leader of which, the self-styled "Bishopix of the Messiahs" Duchessa Nightgal Dayclubr, has been reported conducting secret meetings with Commodore Goldfist."

"Goldfist?" The threshecutioner threw his head back and laughed. "Well _now_ I know you're pulling this out of your nook! Goldfist is an ass-kissing chump, everyone knows that."

"So we thought," said the reporterrorist, gravely. "Which is why your drop-ship so much as touched down." And he added, dramatically and unnecessarily: "It is time for us to reconsider _Goldfist_." 

"Us?" The threshecutioner laughed. "Why are you lumping us together, little alien?"

"Not you!" the reporterrorist scoffed, turning his head to the chaos around as if fascinated by it. "That one was for the anchor. We just shifted to the studio. By the way," he added, as if to placate the now fuming threshecutioner, "there are six counts of trolls registered as Evrain or a variation thereof, four of which are in Shangri-la."

"How do you know?" The threshecutioner asked again, but this time in breathless awe. He leaned almost into the reporterrorist's face; his fingertips dug into the vitreous floor as if he were trying to keep from clutching the alien by the arms.

"You've generated a lot of interest in social media," said the reporterrorist, lightly. "You and the nearly seventy others like you. A lot of names have come up, and their owners are being sought. No doubt these Evrains are currently being spammed with news of your existence, but it just so happens that three of them are varying degrees of unavailable at the moment." 

The threshecutioner gaped, and the surprise shaved several sweeps off his face. But then the guardestroyer suddenly flew up, shouting "Over there!", and the conversation had to be put on hold. They scrambled to follow her lead, tripping over rubble and avoiding falling debris and dragging two equally useless living burdens, until another thunderous boom shook the road under their feet; then Mui raised a hand and sent several small projectiles flying off before suddenly seizing in Karkat's arms, and they were forced to take shelter under another half-collapsed marquee.

The reporterrorist shifted his glasses slightly, looked up to the darkened, ship-covered sky. It came to Karkat that the glasses themselves might be recording in lieu of grubcams. "Once you're properly registered," he continued, lightly as if the ongoing storm was but a vague distraction, "you'll receive a basic introduction kit which includes a tablet. One of the apps in this tablet allows you to search the Troll Immigration Registry for people you might know, so unless your Evrain specifically asked to be unsearchable, they will be right there."

Huh. The threshecutioner said nothing, but seemed satisfied and almost cheered by the answer; this made Karkat curious enough that he managed to stop clutching Mui in order to fish around in his sleeve. The chances of anyone he knew being registered were basically non-existent, what with all his friends having lived far enough away to avoid visits and therefore pirates, but the idea of this app was undeniably cool.

His tablet had migrated to somewhere near his armpit during the confusion, and had molded itself around some very bony parts. It took Karkat a couple of tries to figure out how to make it smooth again; by the time he found the app, the other two coherent children and even Mui were huddled around his shoulders like nosy carrion-gobblers.

"Get your own tablets!" Karkat hissed in annoyance.

"Lost mine," said Scarnose, simply.

"Same," said What's-his-face. Mui tried to poke a crack in the screen and was only thwarted by a timely application of elbow.

There were actually only three Evrains listed in the app; but it also listed one Evrane and two Evarins as possible misspellings. Of the three actual Evrains two had it as a first name, and only one had a second name starting with _B_ , which was about as much as Karkat remembered of it. 

He selected that one, and was taken to a somewhat sparse profile that included a chipper feed. The last thing in the feed was a picture of a heavily freckled female troll, sturdy and muscled, standing on a sunny-bright outcrop over dark green forests and a grey mountain. Her clothes were simple but visibly high-quality— she had a tight sleeveless shirt and tan shorts, both in fabric that looked almost as sturdy as she was; the foot that wasn't cropped out of the picture rested on a boulder in an incredibly solid-looking, visibly reinforced and cushioned boot; and she held a staff with a hand gloved in shiny dark leather. Her eyes squinted nearly closed at the camera under the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat, but she was smiling widely, and a pair of tinted goggles hung around her neck. 

The caption above the picture said: " _last stop before the deepest trail!!! see u guys in 2 weeks with a bjllion pics!! #haegnor trail #nature_ " and a couple words in some alien-looking script.

Her profile displayed a symbol in brown, but in the photo itself she wore none.

Well. Karkat glanced at the Threshecutioner. Indigo-blue, somewhat runty for the caste if he judged by the average height of indigo movie actors, but the places not covered by his bulky armor were completely corded with bulging muscles. His face looked like it had been sanded out of a cement unit. He glared around himself in the kind of uncertainty and confusion that spelt bad things to anything that startled him.

Karkat measured the pros and cons, said fuck it, and crawled slightly closer to the huge fucking professional killer classist dickbag.

"Is... is this her?" he mumbled, hating himself for the way his voice came out soft and high, like he was emulating some small mewling beast. It just happened. He couldn't remember ever producing sounds like this before. His squawkblister seemed to be making its own decisions.

Somehow his fingers did not shiver when he raised his tablet to display the screen. The threshecutioner leaned in close, eyes wide and wondering, and his hands didn't shiver either when he delicately grasped the tablet by the sides and tugged it a little closer to himself. 

And then closer. And then a little more. And then more insistently. The tablet went a little crumply between both his and Karkat's fingers; they were for a moment engaged in a delicate tug-of-war until it finally hit Karkat that this dude was trying to — surprisingly gently — pry the tablet out of his hands. The realization froze him, and he found he couldn't seem to pry his own fingers loose. 

The hairless-mottled alien stepped in to forcibly open the _threshecutioner's_ fingers, oh my god, and of course the threshie took offense, and then a small scuffling slapfight broke out between them— which Karkat missed out on due to having swooned backwards, his mind gently fading to white. 

When he faded back in, safe in the arms of Scarnose and the alien reporterrorist, mere seconds had gone by; the scuffle had already resolved, to his surprise, by the alien grasping the threshecutioner by the wrists, to everyone's surprise. 

The two tendrils on the alien's head were slightly raised at the root and vibrating like a pair of limp whips, possibly a threat display. "Take shame!" he said, in a truly atrocious accent. "Rip of hand child? Shame on face! Very no!" 

And then he let go of the threshecutioner's hands to gesticulate in clear frustration.

" _Dude_ ," the reporterrorist added, somewhat disapproving but not particularly surprised, "I know you're emotionally compromised, but what is—" he peeked down at Karkat's now slightly limp tablet— "miss Battik going to think?" Pause. "Is she a quadrantmate?"

The threshecutioner bared his teeth. "She's a _friend_ ," he snarled. "She's the _only one left_ , and I'll be damned if I'll let a bunch of alien weenies tell me what I can or cannot pluck out of the hands of some random _pupa!_ "

He reached out and yanked the tablet from Karkat's now nerveless fingers. The lack of resistance took him by surprise; he overcompensated and fell back on his ass, his arms pinwheeling helplessly, and the tablet splatted somewhere far in the middle of the road— on a pile of burning, half-melted ship plating.

" _Fuck!_ " Karkat squeaked out. He wasn't even angry, things were simply just _too much_ ; now this awful overwhelmed feeling was taking over his head, and he couldn't seem to keep his mouth shut through it. "Fuck fuck fuck bulge nookblister, you could see it from my hand just fine, you could have asked, why did you, _go pick it up!_ " 

"What?" the threshecutioner asked dumbly, blinking at Karkat as if noticing for the first time that he was capable of speech.

"That's where the map is, you festering fecal pipe—" Karkat waved helplessly at the smoldering wreckage, right on time for a huge fuckoff pillar to come plummeting down. It toppled right across the road with a deafening rumble and a quake so strong the transparent pavement rippled visibly under their quivering asses; the road gently cracked around its length, and then started to sink, slow and almost hesitant. 

" _Ass!_ " said Karkat, with feeling, as the slowly sinking pillar took the pile of debris cradling his tablet right along for the ride.

"We're gonna have to climb over it," came the guardestroyer's voice from behind them, flat and unamused. They all turned to look at her nearly simultaneously.

"But it's sinking!" squeaked What's-his-face, very reasonably in Karkat's opinion.

"Tough!" she said, cocking her strange gun. "That's our only path!"

And so they once again tripped their way out from under the marquee and through a much denser obstacle field. Except for the threshecutioner; he lifted his stunned lusus over his head and tossed it past the pillar, then leapt over it without looking back or even so much as bothering to rescue the tablet.

"Asshole," Karkat mumbled under his breath. 

The alien adults once again did their weird cultural thing, helping them cross the gap and climb up on top of the pillar while it was still a good halfway down road level. Scarnose and What's-his-face wasted no time in scampering to the other side and beyond, but the pillar was wide, and Karkat had his hands full with a giggling, mumbling Mui, and found himself lagging behind. 

Hell if he was going to sink along with the tablet. He vaulted Mui bodily over the gap on the other side, not unlike the threshecutioner and his lusus, and the kid fell sprawled in a boneless tangle; Karkat himself somehow managed to leap over the next gap on his own. Only once back on his feet with Mui securely grasped under an arm did he bother to take an updated stock of the chaos.

Behind him, the guardestroyer was but one of several shieldbearing warriors, each of them attached to a small group. Several of these groups were also on the process of climbing over the pillar; the guardestroyers themselves stayed back, covering their retreat against the incoming line of grim troll invaders— he caught a glimpse of stumbling lusii, flopping limbs, bodies sagging to the ground like floppy mannequins, and quickly averted his eyes. Time to drag Mui away and forget what was happening for the next however long.

However long was the few seconds it took a projectile from the next psychic plasma spray to slam down on the road ahead and turn nearly half of it to slag. The floor bucked beneath his feet; up ahead, close to the impact, the threshecutioner bounced high in the air, his lusus slipped off his grip, and both toppled over the opposing railing, one trying to grab at the other. _Something_ flew straight at him in a blur, and Karkat's brain went welp, this is it, but Mui went prickly and sparky under his arm and suddenly the thing stopped— flipped back like a surprised critter— fell down as Mui suddenly started spewing yellow out of his eyes and nostrils— 

Karkat held him tighter and bolted past the rubble, towards the glowing heat ahead; he ran grimly past the melted glass, hugging as close to the railing as he could and still feeling half his body cook from the impact's proximity. " _Grab my tablet if you find it!_ Asshole," he shouted down to the swarming paths crisscrossing below. He thought he could see the threshecutioner twitching not too far down, having apparently fallen on some sort of giant cluckbeast on another road beneath them. Lucky bastard. God, he really was cooking. The melted patch of road was already several feet behind him, but his body couldn't seem to get over it. His eyeballs ached in his skull.

From that point on it was nearly everyone out for himself; some held hands, other held pupas, but they ran scattered around the crumbling, half-empty street, staring only straight ahead— and they ran like a pack of animals, some even bleeding beast-red like he himself did. Broken roads rippled above; pillars danced drunkenly in the distance; another beam shower rained down like so many scarlet and blue shooting stars; ships sunk languidly from the sky, puking black smoke from their innards, barely detected by the remaining light shields, and the fact that most of them were of troll make somehow failed to be reassuring.

Karkat gazed up. The world had gone dark, twilit, the sky nearly completely covered by stuttering shields and invading vessels. Looks like we're winning, he thought. Too bad he was on the loser's field. He tried to feel proud. Rah, rah, Alternia? He did feel a bit of a funny glow inside, almost completely divorced from the awful reality around him. It was like he almost felt safe, but the feeling didn't come at all from the sight of the chaos upwards. What was it? What was that thrumming in his veins—

Up above, right on the patch of sky his eyes had fixed on, a familiar golden halo flickered, sparked, dimmed, and then bloomed like a vast cosmic flower. _He exploded_ , Karkat thought, but almost immediately he knew he was thinking wrong— because the flower's petals coalesced rather than diffusing, shrunk down into a stroboscopic circle, then a kaleidoscopic shield, and a many-spoked mask; and then it widened into a vast spirograph, and it unfolded in two, then four, and again and again into a vast fractal pair of golden fairy wings.

He knew he was looking at something amazing, even before he found himself surrounded by wondering gasps. The wings _sang_. The air danced. His feet were light. The dancing fractal far above _spoke_ to him; and as he strained to hear, he saw the great wings zip in front of another collective plasma volley, and bear it like an unforgiving wall. They would Defend. They would Withstand. Those words they told him, and he believed, he couldn't _not_.

And as if this sight hadn't been enough, another immense _thing_ floated down through the broken dome like an emissary from the heavens— shaped not like a ship, but like some great abstract sculpture, adorned in leaf-green sails and earthy whorls, plant-like but inorganic, its stems moving and shifting like a vast wire puzzle defending its unmoving center; it dwarfed all other ships and ignored all incoming projectiles like they were so many bug bites, and it parked itself straight in front of the Battleship Condescension in unmistakable challenge.

A murmur rose around him, alien words spoken in worshipful admiration, and among them he thought he could hear someone shout gleefully— " _Queen Jane!_ " 

The sky between the two mighty ships burst with lightning and thunder and a thousand flashing stars. The spell was diminished; reality reasserted itself in its noisy, burning, wobbling, collapsing glory. Beams still rained down. Pillars crashed thunderously, bringing plazas and palaces and roads with them, and half his body still felt scalded. Their path started to slant downwards, towards a somehow undamaged tower not too far off, a bright red arrow blinking over its entrance. The shelter hive, he could bet.

Guardestroyers swarmed the air around the shelter, directing foot traffic from the many incoming roads, creating vast shielding domes against a constant hail of debris. A group detached itself to fly toward them, shields at the ready. 

"We're almost there!" he gasped to Mui, jiggling bonelessly under his arm.

Then pain pierced through his forgotten ankle, and it crumpled under him like a hive of cards.

He toppled face-down, dragging Mui right along. Goddamnit, why did he have to open his big fat shoutpipe? He flailed at the floor, tried to push himself up before he'd even figured out where up _was_. His arms shook. His knees wobbled. His head swam. Where his heart had only just swelled, it was now going _fffsst_. He'd blown through his second wind, and was unexpectedly left empty-handed. Empty of wind. Which was nothing in the first place. It just went to show that his brain was also gone.

More likely, all those little tube injections he'd gotten had run their course.

"Nothing f'rer it," he mumbled through his thick tongue, stumbled to his feet, bowed down to grab Mui by the back of his robe— and then there was a spark, and the world did cartwheels around him, and he found himself bouncing down with a loud, deafening, thunderous impact on a heap of his own limbs.

Plasma beam, was the first thought in his mind as he disentangled his legs, and glanced around. The second thought in his mind was the giant fuckoff pillar at his back that had crossed the road in a vast diagonal and missed him by little more than a foot.

The third was the smear of yellow squirting out from under it. Deceptively small. Discreet.

He understood right away. 

A vast, empty silence took over his mind. He just knew, it was obvious; there were no thoughts of "oh my god", or "why", or "it can't be", or even "is there enough brain to save"; there were no thoughts at all other than undeniable realization, and a crushing sense of futility.

His body sagged back, and the universe listed back along with him. He looked up at the swarming sky and let the building scream bubble slowly to the surface...

But it hadn't yet reached his throat when the sound of crying came to his ears. It snapped him out of the blackness; in a daze his eyes searched for the source of the sound, and focused on a small creature nearby. Pupa. Alien. Brown. Crying. 

The universe wasn't listing back. It was the road, cracked between the child and a collapsed, bleeding adult. It reached out to the pupa with a feeble hand; other adults abandoned their flight to approach, but the gap was widening, the film holding the road together stretching too fast and ripping too soon, and Karkat dug himself out of the silence and scrambled to his feet and ran toward the pupa and grabbed it by the underarms and tossed it over the widening maw at the horrified reporterrorist with a strength he did not recognize, and it had barely reached the alien's arms when Karkat suddenly _flew_ —

He flew, buoyed by heat, and fire, and a sound that came as a rumble and turned his ears into sudden searing pain. He flew very fast, and sudden, and fell to blessed unconsciousness midair; and he flew past the toppled and half-blinded crowd of helpers into an elongated smear of blood on the ground, limbs broken burned ripped and askew like a much abused doll. 

But the reporterrorist, who was still on air, blinked the explosion out of his eyes and scrambled to his feet for his duty; and losing all shred of common sense he stumbled right up to the gruesome sight of a burned and broken Karkat and said, in his obscure native tongue: " _Sweet Skaia have mercy!_ "

And as the emergency troops flew down in a swarm around the fallen, shields and suspended-animation capsules at the ready, he kept babbling, now switching almost unconsciously to Alternian. "It's him— he really is a child! The troll! The prophecy!! But he's so _small_ —"

Unaware as he was of the great burns down his entire front, the reporterrorist had to be forcibly laid down. 


End file.
